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spaceman_2020

Wild that people will call the founder of SpaceX a "showman"

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Let's settle on calling the founder of Hyperloop a "showman".

Yes. Because we should all be judged by our failures.

Hey, Im a fan. Fail fast. Build things.

Most very rich people just sit and roll in their money in the finance markets like scrooge mcduck.

But… I think the performance in the whitehouse was performative nonesense.

What a waste of everyone’s time for the sake of appearances.

More building things, less dancing please Elon.

He has done many impressive things, but one consistent thing about the man is that he always over promises and regularly under delivers. The examples are too numerous to count (smashing the CT's "armour" glass, humans to Mars in 2024, Thai cave submarine, naming your driver assistance technology Full Self Driving, etc, etc)

Perhaps that's simply the price of achievement, but Showman is apt

That is a real, important accomplishment, but he's also a showman.

Don’t forget Zip2, PayPal, Neuralink, OpenAI, and The Boring Company.

There are large swaths of people that accept headlines as fact and/or cannot or will not grapple with nuance and complexity (“I think Elon’s a jerk and he is a formidable engineer.”) Perhaps it’s a sign of these polarized times, or, as I believe, people have always been like this. We just have more time and resources to dedicate to outrage and flamewarring than we did in the past.

I don't deny his accomplishments. On the contrary, I think he is a genius. It's just that he is an extremely, damagingly biased genius.

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1240754657263144960

Genuine question - are there (or have there been ) any geniuses that are not unhinged?

Yes, there has been nice geniuses (ie. people with extreme talent), Mozart was for example a good person. Da Vinci (if a little sycophantic when young) was not unhinged at all nor abusive and was appreciated.

But since romantism we have built this image of the genius as necessarily abusive.

I’m sure abusive genius are very visible (by definition?) and that abusive people tend to monopolize more ressources too. (Like these tenured professors that use their students to advance their own career)

Einstein, Euler, and Darwin were also nice people by many accounts.

I think you guys shouldn't be comparing “geniuses” because i don't think thats the forcing function here (ie IQ and ability).

The forcing function is having so much responsibility and stress from running so many companies. You have no extra bandwidth for anything. All your time is spent.

So maybe look at comparable people with insane schedules/workloads/very high pressure situations.

Fair. With Elon it feels like there's an obsessiveness that drives him to take on so much responsibility. And as you say, that can affect what he says publicly.

True -- also I wouldn't say Elon is a genius. I feel thats a term for people who solve deep intractable physics/math problems. Elon's admirable attributes are that he is an insane capital allocator, has a very acute engineering mind (rare for leadership), curious mind, sees the future paths, dedicated focus and is an unabashed salesman of his products and philosophy (maybe this one isn't as admirable but its critical to his success).

Euler was famously a genius and a well-tempered family man.

He was ousted from Paypal before anything major happened, he was basically just a shareholder.

The Boring Company is an obvious bust. So is the Hyperloop. Neuralink is another likely bust. Tesla solar is going nowhere. The Cybertruck is a millstone around Tesla's neck. Etc, etc.

Usually Elon's technical flaws aren't on display, or at least he covers them well. For example while it's true FSD hasn't worked out, but I don't know you could say at the time "most competent AI devs knew it wouldn't work out". However, when Elon attempted to move PayPal from Linux to Windows, most competent software engineers would have advised against it. Paypal isn't an example of Elon's genius in action - it's the opposite.

> FSD hasn't worked out

Says who? I've tried it and the capabilities are amazing. If you told me 10 years ago that I would be able to buy this in 2025 I wouldn't have believed you.

Yeah HN hivemind is wild. FSD is something you can buy and use RIGHT NOW. Autonomous driving in YOUR HANDS. Waymo still feels like a school project.

Tesla is level 2. Waymo is level 4.

Says me, who owns a Y that has the FSD package. Random braking on a highway, indicator lights coming on for no apparent reason, windscreen wipers the start on a dry day, attempts move through a red light. None of those things are common, none are serious if your hands are on the wheel and you are giving it your full attention. It's a serviceable attempt at FSD Level 3, and auto park works well.

But when I bought it, Elon was promoting hiring out your car as a FSD level 5 taxi when you weren't using it. If I regularly took my hands off the steering wheel and went for a snooze (if that was possible, which it isn't because they would be sued within an inch of their life), I'd be dead by now.

When Tesla introduced HW2 it was clear to people in the self-driving industry that it wouldn't work out. Elon was insistent on repeating mistakes that other companies had already learned from. Of course the other companies never considered some people's willingness to pay good money just to pretend that their cars can drive themselves.

I am "just a shareholder" in Paypal. Elon Musk had a > 10% stake inherited from his ownership of one of the companies that was the precursor to Paypal itself. It's not remotely the same thing. And listing failures is not meaningful at all. Failure is the default outcome in business.

Ever heard of luck? That is my main point.

I think the real purpose of the Boring Company and Hyperloop were preventing/slowing expansion of public transit, and that by that measure they were successful.

I think the purpose was to extract money from governments, like most of Elon's businesses.

I don't think it was a carefully calculated conspiracy (such as 1)

I think it was an engineer with found wealth starting to do stuff with it.

but nowadays I think he has evolved into something different, maybe some of it from the wild public feedback loop, some of it because some of the things he cares about are going wildly wrong.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...

Elon says it was a conspiracy designed to sabotage high speed rail, just like the one you cited. The Koch brothers helped him:

https://www.fresnobee.com/opinion/editorials/article26445107...

There is nothing in the article, the twitter thread it quotes, or the text from Musk's biography quoted in the respective tweet, that indicates that the Koch brothers assisted Elon Musk in any way in trying to sabotage California's high speed rail. They're simply mentioned as other people that oppose transitioning away from automobiles.

Furthermore, Elon Musk doesn't say that the Hyperloop "was a conspiracy designed to sabotage high speed rail." He is quoted in his biography as saying that he hates high speed rail, doesn't want them to build it, and thinks it's a waste of money. He also says that he had no intention of leading the effort to build Hyperloop himself, where he's directly quoted as saying, "Down the road, I might fund or advise on a Hyperloop project, but right now I can't take my eye off the ball at either SpaceX or Tesla." The biographer speculates that this means it was a cynical ploy to get HSR cancelled, and I don't think it's unreasonable to infer this, but one could just as easily infer that Elon really did want the California legislature to build something akin to a Hyperloop instead.

There's no debating that Elon hates public transit, he'll tell you himself[1]. You don't have to spread misinformation to make that point

[1] https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-awkward-dislike-mass-t...

He wasn't even a fonder of Tesla. He was just a investor that became the CEO.

And the tweet below makes me question a lot about him. Doesn't sound like a genius to me.

"Lidar and radar reduce safety due to sensor contention. If lidars/radars disagree with cameras, which one wins?

This sensor ambiguity causes increased, not decreased, risk. That’s why Waymos can’t drive on highways.

We turned off the radars in Teslas to increase safety. Cameras ftw."

Waymo is driving on the 101 in LA

Tesla’s been doing that for years in SF. There’s only been one fatality on that stretch of the 101 so far.

More info on autopilot deaths (59 including 2 FSD):

https://www.tesladeaths.com/

Waymo’s had one fatality (other driver was at fault), but that’s not normalized by miles driven.

> That's why Waymo can't drive on highways.

^^^ (they are)

You can’t compare Tesla and Waymo. Only the latter is truly autonomous.

I've driven both SF 101 and LA 101, they are not the same thing.

To be fair Tesla was in a very primitive state when he took over.

Yeah, he’s not an engineer. He fools people by regurgitating stuff from actual smart people.

Wild that people will call a guy who bought SpaceX the founder of SpaceX.

Either go ague with Wikipedia, or put some argument in the comment when making claims you expect people to verify themselves. People are just going to look it up on Wiki.

> SpaceX was founded by Elon Musk in 2002 with a vision of decreasing the costs of space launches, paving the way to a self-sustaining colony on Mars.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX 2nd paragraph

You’re arguing over semantics. Was SpaceX the most successful space company before Elon took over? Did they have reusable rockets?

If the answer is no, then clearly the catalyst was Elon taking over

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