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Comment by codechicago277 | Hacker News Reader

“On Monday, Musk thought it would be funny to expand the area covered by its three-week-old Austin robotaxi service to resemble a giant penis when seen on a map.

“Harder, better, faster, stronger,” the $1 trillion company wrote on Monday, a double entendre referencing the synth pop track of the same name by Daft Punk, a duo appropriately known for performing as robots. Musk approvingly reposted the phallus-shaped service map, adding the fare would now be hiked to $6.90 per ride from $4.20 previously, both numbers the 54-year old often employs for comical effect.”

It’s amazing that anyone still takes him seriously. One of the first riders almost hit a train, and this is what he’s spending his time on. It’s inexcusable, but his fans lap it up.

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I'd agree with you, and mention that there's always the option to short TSLA stock, if you believe that the fans will stop being fans soon enough.

A lot of people have lost a ton of money shorting TSLA.

It's not a stock, nor a company. It's a religion. Quite hard to bet against a religion. You never know if it's the one that's going to last 2,000 years.

A decade ago his antics were seen as whimsical and perhaps funny, especially to his fan base. With that fan base ever shrinking his antics today are disgusting and trying to appeal to the crowd which still appreciates something this low-brow.

It's like a different dumb jackass assumed that role some time ago.

Why would they use what was a science role model that way?

Why the boards of directors of any of his companies do not ban him from making social media posts from his personal account is beyond me.

I doubt that the personality that leads to this behavior would accept being told not to do something by anyone.

They’re his buddies and are set for life. Why rock the boat?

Nazi salutes won't be forgotten.

On national TV.

In a presidential inauguration.

A permanent stain on US history.

All billionaires are permanent stains on US history. Musk is just the poster child for this behavior.

In your world view, what would you personally do if you start one, or multiple, incredibly successful companies and amass $ billion(s) of equity in the process?

Shut the hell up and stay the hell out of politics.

Without subsidies from the Obama administration, Tesla never succeeds.

Without government contracts, SpaceX never succeeds.

Without a mysterious visa, Musk never stays legally in the U.S.

All of those are true, but what do they have to do with the question posed?

Donate aggressively to the local community, mostly towards public transit, education, child development, and housing.

Try to socialize LVT and other policies that will improve everyone’s lives.

Thankfully all of these problems are just money problems - price tags on a shelf no billionaire wants to pay apparently. If it turns out these are actually just hard problems, whoever will we blame?

Billionaires are trying to make that happen with California Forever, but of course you'd have to believe what they say in order to believe in it.

In case it wasn't clear my original comment was sarcasm. These are hard problems that are not solved by being funded, but people like to peek in the pockets of billionaires and ask why they haven't bought solutions yet. I have not heard of California Forever though and will look into that.

Land Value Tax?

Ideally that wouldn't be possible. The actual workers that built the companies would realize the gains.

Need more info on this, because its really easy for somebody to stick a camera at an angle that if somebody waves at the crowd it becomes iffy.

Was interesting to see actual video of a newish public figure wave at the crowd, wince and look in the direction of the camera. Clearly newly trained not to wave at the crowd.

A decade ago the antics seemed less childish, imo. E.g. calling the starship "BFR" or racing the snail with the boring machine, or the Tesla "plaid" mode.

The obsession with 420, 69 and dick jokes seems another level.

Weird they didn't include a photo, tweet including commentary confirming the juvenile justification:

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1944688226037325868

Probably because major news outlets are reluctant to include pictures of penises, even stylized ones, in their articles.

hes always been like this. from faking video games to pushing memecoins.

his being cringe itself isnt the issue. its the lack of EQ that leads to someone being a slave to wanting to be liked. it doesnt inspire confidence in his ability to think rationally. like how hes perfectly fine grifting and contributing to the decrease of trust in society. its messed up

He was definitely not always like that, at least loudly in public.

He lost me when he called (EDIT: REMOVED NAME) a respected cave diver a "pedo". (I guess 7 years ago now.)

The man refrenced might prefer his name be continually indexed with said term.

If I were Vernon Unsworth I'd be fine with searches for "Vernon Unsworth pedo" coming up with discussions about how stupid Elon Musk is for calling me a pedo out of spite and how he really should be in jail for that absurd defamatory statement, but isn't because he's politically untouchable.

That was the moment the veil was lifted.

There's a model Y with The Sticker on it in my street, introduced years after he showed his colors like that. No, dear neighbor, when you bought that car, you knew.

I don’t think a majority of Tesla buyers knew about the “pedo guy” thing. His recent antics have been much more high profile

I think you can estimate the later bound of his meltdown to when he called the rescue diver a "pedo"?

He made a space rocket company called Space Sex and your choices of Tesla cars are S3XY. Maybe he wasn't like that in the PayPal days, but ever since he has been loud in public, he has been like this loud in public.

The difference is that it used to be combined with some pretty cool stuff. He was a loudmouth jackass but he was (running companies that were) doing neat things with electric cars and rockets. Now the cars and rockets are stagnant, his newer ventures are jokes, he blew up Twitter, and is making a decent attempt at wrecking the country I call home. The loudmouth jackassery was kind of amusing when there was cool stuff to go along with it. Not so much anymore.

He wasnt running those companies so much as they were running him. These groups had dedicated soft protocls for handling elon's bullshit and disasterous influence. He's always just been the money guy. His ideas have always been shit, and the ideas he shared that were good invariably were ones he was handed and was repeating (often handling related questions rather poorly).

just look at his consistent and extreme lack of comprehension of fairly basic engineering. The man is a talentless hack, who paid his way into fame and the appearance of success. His contribution to paypal was his money. When paypal and x (at the time elons online bank) merged, paypal's code etc. Weren't really infleunced by elon or even x. X was crazy unsafe and unreliable, and so merging really only brought together intelligent havenots with a decent product with an unintelligent nepobabies wealth.

he didnt invent tesla either. He just bought into the company and bought the right to call himself a founder and marketed that angle aggresivley.

elon is an idiot, and always has been. Idiots need symbols though, so other idiots idolize him, propping him up.

Was he just lucky, then? SpaceX and Tesla have both been very successful, with business models that looked pretty dubious at the time. Electric cars and rockets looked like good ways to turn large fortunes into small ones, not the other way around.

If Tesla fails to deliver on the tech hype promises, is he really that rich?

He bought Twitter, he bought an election, he founds startups basically for fun.

And even if Tesla evaporated today, he’d still be one of the richest people on the planet.

High net worth != rich and certainly != smart

Even being rich != smart

he is certainly rich by most peoples standards but his networth is enormously inflated and represents unrealised capital which he gas succesfully leveraged for things like buying political influence.

That being said, most of those we would call intelligent in this kind of discussion are not good woth money, they're good woth more practical and interesting things. Things that aren't total figments of our collective imagination. Being good with money is like being good in theology.

There is no way a net worth of over four hundred billion Earth dollars is not "rich." Yeah, net worth and liquidity aren't exactly equivalent, but your statement on that has exactly zero relevance here.

As far as intelligence goes, there are certainly ways to become rich without it. But Musk didn't do it any of those ways as far as I can tell.

I totally get why people would say he misleads people and his stated wealth is inflated as a result. He has enormously overpromised and underdelivered, no doubt about that.

But I can't understand saying that is the only element of his success. Forget about his blather for a second. Tesla has sold millions of cars. SpaceX has done hundreds of successful orbital launches. You can't fake that.

Is he entirely responsible for those successes? Of course not. Could Tesla and SpaceX have achieved those things if the only thing Musk brought to the table was a relatively paltry amount of money? I really don't see how. You're telling me that this guy founded rocket company with $90 million that two decades later accounts for more than half of all orbital launches on the planet, and he's a talentless hack and only succeeds because he's willing to lie and his fans are too stupid? That doesn't add up.

Elon is willing to lie and his fans are too stupid to see through being mislead. What major targets of teslas have been met? Fsd? Nope. Sub micron tolerance on builds? Nope. None of what he promises happens, but it doesn't stop stock surges. Did doge (shit coin) go to the moon? No. Bunch of chumps got pump and dumped though. Did grok beat anyone at anything? Nope. Is it non-woke? Nope.

Grifting people takes a form of intelligence, i agree, but it is not what we usually mean when we say intelligence in this context.

> Maybe he wasn't like that in the PayPal days

Let's be clear that the PayPal days consisted of his company merging with a company that was doing something his was failing at, spending 4 months as the CEO arguing that the entire thing that Comenity had built (which was "PayPal", that they'd already built a working version of, trademarked, etc., before the merger) be thrown away and rewritten in ASP, because he didn't understand Java.

So horrific was his tenure at PayPal that, in a world where CEOs "pursue opportunities", "spend time with family", etc., Musk was openly fired. In absentia. The morning he left for his honeymoon. How badly do you have to fuck up as CEO for the Board to do that to you?

Musk's "contribution" to PayPal is mostly just "cashing dividend checks".

Business practices are being enshittified to the point of 4chan. Profit, for the lulz.-

Not so long ago you'd gain traction through insight or depth. Now it's absurdity that wins the price, vanity upon vanity.-

At some point the idiogarchs are going to celebrate (celebrate) their accidents and dead as a win. Lol.-

They are "the men in the arena" taking chances pushing humanity forward, we are on the sidelines, doing nothing but criticizing people greater than us. Death is necessary for humanity to progress. Eleven workers died building the golden gate bridge, etc.

Funny how people who live lives of unfathomable luxury are the ones “taking chances,” while the people who literally die in the process are just the price of progress.

I feared it sounded familiar. There it is.-

You first then

Musk is a clearly brilliant man who does not know how to keep his mouth shut or not act like a teenager. I know he doesn't need my respect... But he's certainly lost all of it by now.

And for people who are like "yeah but he gets results," are you really saying he wouldn't be getting more results if he didn't spend the last 10 years being an idiot online?

> Musk is a clearly brilliant man

proof left as an exercise for the reader.

Citation for the "clearly brilliant" part?

“One of the first riders almost hit a train“

How many human drivers almost hit something?

I wonder: when a human does it "we" have someone to blame. I think as a species we like that.

When a machine kills someone do we go after … the company? (Maybe we should all be shorting robo-taxi companies.)

In the 1000s of miles I have been a passenger in Ubers, taxis, etc.. I have never had one try to drive through a railroad crossing.

2yrs ago https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhyqKdhoYaM

We need stats, not anecdotes. Last I saw, Tesla’s “full self-driving” required human intervention something like once every couple hundred miles. That’s absolutely atrocious. It’s probably better now, but still a long way from where it needs to be. For comparison, the average American driver goes around 100,000 miles between collisions.

Right and if you remove elderly, drunks and teens, who are generally not your taxi driver of choice, the driving stats skew even better.

So average driver is a low, probably incorrect bar to meet.

Most of the time when a human does it is because they were either operating the car while they were tired or ill which interfered with their ability to pay attention or they were doing human stuff that distracted them such as dealing with kids, talking to others in the car or by phone, daydreaming, looking at something interesting on the side of the road, panicking because they just noticed a big spider on the ceiling above them, and so on.

A self-driving car should not get tired. It shouldn't be doing any robotic equivalent of those things that distract humans.

This is why almost hitting things is a bigger deal for self-driving cars. Humans are expected to almost hit things, because we do a lot more than drive cars and we are easily distracted.

A self-driving car is a specialized system designed for that one task. If it almost hits something it is either a sign that there is a flaw in how the system works, the real world testing was not good enough, or it has hit an extremely rare edge case

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