There is an entire Wikipedia article about Musk's (mostly) failed predictions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_predictions_for_autono...
But Musk often acts as if he does actually intend to be taken seriously. In the case of the current story, consider the marketing resources Tesla have poured into their previous "Battery Day" events and look at the press reaction; it's clear that at least some people believed that the claims stacked up.
A quick search of the hn archives for "4680" shows a similar picture. Yes, there were always some sceptical voices, but they were often shouted down as being from people motivated by an anti-Elon grudge. Nevertheless, the sentiment tended to be overwhelmingly positive with many posters actively reinforcing the hype.
Now, whether or not a self-selecting sample of hn posters can be seen as "reasonable bystanders" is certainly debatable - but it does seem that we're getting close to the point where Musk is going to have to start branding those who believe him as being exceptionally gullible in order to escape a charge of misleading advertising.
Now excuse me while I go check on where my 2016 full-self-driving Tesla car. It was supposed to pick me up 9 years ago, something must have happened.
Because you can cancel your reservation and get your deposited refunded. See terms at Tesla.com
This is a textbook sunk cost fallacy.
And if you don't think so, please give me $50k, I'll give you back $50.001 in 8 years, a dollar more! You'll come out ahead, right?
Mr Musk is a strange fellow indeed, but he's not guilty of all the vices and sins. Just plenty enough of them.
CEOs are constantly making claims and promises that are aspirational at best, their compensation isn't held until all promises are reached.
> Musk sold 19.5 million Tesla shares worth about $3.95 billion in November 2022
I mean sure it is his to sell, but how is that different?
My evidence is that in America people sue for these things left and right all the time. It's a popular pastime for lawyers to get a class action lawsuit for securities fraud together. But as far as I can tell, Musk / Tesla weren't convicted of these things in conjunction with the sale of Tesla stock to buy Twitter.
Maybe I'm misremembering but I seem to recall him (Tesla?) selling a bunch of doge and bitcoin after months of pumping despite some big drops between.
Tesla's profits have been positive since then, so this may no longer be the case, but still, that's a very iffy state of affairs.
So the statement does not necessarily be false to be a lie - if the intent is to deceive.
I think you have it backwards. The entire tech bro scene reeks of fraud schemes, and the most successful ones seem to be pulled into all kinds of government schemes as well.
The map precedes the territory
It's a bummer though that it's limited to Telsa. Would love to see a fuller one of his all bold statements about robotics, tunnel transportation, space travel, and AI.
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-lists/elon-musk...
I don't agree with how they went about trying to cut government spending, but that's beside the point. When he wasn't in control and ultimately got stonewalled and removed as soon as he ran through the initial hype of the project, how is it his fault the claims failed? Do you disagree that the government has a similar amount of waste and spending that could be cut?
And regarding Elon's claims? Is he a toddler or a grown man? If I claim to control the tides and fail, is it not a failure or a lie on my part when I can't control them?
The question - is Musk lying on purpose, or is this more 90-90 rule where he made (obviously wrong) assumptions based on current progress?
(And I say that with conviction. https://hindenburgresearch.com/ are my heroes.)
The persistent short interest in Tesla shows at least that the critics are voicing their concerns in the market.
You and I might think that Tesla is overvalued, maybe. But if it's a bubble, at least it's not a fragile one that pops at the slightest pin prick like a few shorts.
As it stands, he can get a trillion dollar pay package if a something-trillion market cap target is hit.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/04/elon-musk-loses-...
Musk also bought into Tesla.
So its not like he invented some kind of alien technology.
It was always about having good enough marketing to permit 10 years of R&D to make the car actually attractive.
The simple truth is that he made electric cars viable competitors to gas-powered cars. His genius is not that he invented them, it's that he profitably manufactured decently reliable cars for a price that lots of people found attractive.
You can try and dismiss it as "marketing," but things like the Gigapress and FSD/Autopilot are impressive technical achievements in their own right. Even more impressive is that he built up a new car company that didn't fold and has had the best selling car in the US for significant chunks of time.
I don't like the guy, I think that FSD is dangerous, and I will never buy a Tesla for as long as he's in charge, but it's crazy that so many people feel the need to discredit his achievements. Sure, he benefited from selling carbon credits and EV subsidies, but if it were such an easy thing to do why did it take so long for anyone else to sell a good EV?
Before he smoked that reefer, his space company was catching the largest booster ever made with metal chopsticks, all paid for by global satellite internet revenue.
His electric crossover/SUV was the best selling car in America.
Now that he’s gotten distracted by politics I dislike, he’s not doing any of that. Definitely no longer the world’s greatest builder.
/s
Huh? You think starlink is funding space-x? If they lost all government and private launch business tomorrow and had to rely on Stalink revenues to stay in business they wouldn’t last through next month.
> His electric crossover/SUV was the best selling car in America.
It was, and then he fried his brain and decided to support fascists across the globe and can’t understand why people no longer want to support him or his businesses.
He apparently watched handmaid’s tale and thought “man those Gilead guys are really onto something”.
He and Thiel claim South Africa’s current government is engaged in genocide against whites, but they have never criticized apartheid.
In the last year alone, around 2/3 of space X's revenue was directly tied to starlink launches.
> If they lost all government and private launch business tomorrow and had to rely on Stalink revenues to stay in business they wouldn’t last through next month.
That's kind of the problem.
It's really annoying that I'm defending him because I find him reprehensible, but the truth is that he's accomplished some crazy things.
I would argue: yes, to the extent that a leader gets to be described as having "accomplished" the work of the team.
It's not nothing, to be a visionary and charismatic leader!
But at the same time… when the reality distortion field seems to be in the process of transforming into a cult of personality, I think it's fair to ask if he'll ever again do something like a new SpaceX or a new Tesla, either as a maker or an investor.
I'm not sure when the cut-off between the two states, RDF and cult, would be. Not unreasonable to say it was when he libelled the cave diver, but there are other times it could've been.
It's been obvious since the submarine incident.
Using it nightly for a few months though? The effect on your brain looks like CTE.
I'm not gonna link the articles, but there are photos of the mountains of defective parts and plenty of people complaining about how terrible the first cars produced that way were. Tesla persevered and now other car manufacturers are trying to duplicate their results.
Huh? Nearly all of his profit was government subsidies designed to push EV adoption. And now he’s trying to pull the ladder up behind him.
Tesla has not been profitable for the vast majority of its existence when it comes to selling a car for more money than it takes to produce.
The government subsidies were available to his competitors at the time. Its not like that gave him a competitive advantage. Everyone else was on the same playing field.
[I hate that im defending that guy]
Where is this claim coming from? I don't see that in the history of the automobile wiki [1], and given that the first early motorized carriages were a century before Ben Franklin flew a kite I have to assume they were electric vehicles.
Nissan might like a word about that.
Tesla was the first to take range seriously.
Tesla was founded in 2003, and licensed the power train developed above. Musk bought into the company in 2004. Tesla teamed up with Lotus in 2004. The first Tesla Roadster prototype was shown in 2006 and delivery of production cars began in 2008. By 2009 they had made 500 of them.
I don't like the man very much either, but exaggerating the state of Tesla before Musk was involved is silly. Before the Model S, Tesla was very small and it wouldn't have surprised anybody if it dried up and blew away in the wind.
You're trying to use weasel words to try to hide the fact that the Nissan Leaf, which was released in 2010 and elected world car of the year, was the world's most successful electric car and top-selling electric car until 2020.
That does not happen if 98% of anything doesn't like it.
Any claim involving "road trips" is a red herring because the Nissan Leaf was designed as a city car used in daily commutes, which means a daily driver for your 1h trips. This is by far the most popular use of a car in the world.
Why do you think it's design range was slightly over 300km? That roughly represents a ceiling of a round trip that takes 2 hours each direction.
For over a decade, the whole world has been buying Nissan Leafs more than any other electric car. How do you explain it?
Actually it does. Electric car sales were so anemic during that time claiming the title made it trivial to be supported by 2% of the population.
> Any claim involving "road trips" is a red herring because the Nissan Leaf was designed as a city car used in daily commutes, which means a daily driver for your 1h trips. This is by far the most popular use of a car in the world.
No it’s not. “Range anxiety” was a constant refrain for anything mentioning electric cars during the first 20 years of the century.
A “city car” isn’t a concept in the US. Only when you get into upper middle class where people can afford multiple cars per household is when you could sacrifice one car like this.
From my rural hometown, the drive to varying degrees of civilization (just big enough to have a small shopping center up to the state capital) is about 25 and 75 miles, respectively. Cities sized in between are around 40-50mi out. The drive to the nearest tiny town for groceries and such is about 2 miles.
I currently live in a suburb and everything one might need, including an international airport, is within a 30mi radius, with the majority of that being within a 5mi radius.
With that in mind and remembering that the bulk of the population lives in cities or their surrounding metro areas, "city cars" are viable for more people than they aren't. Sometimes they'd be better suited as secondary vehicles dedicated to errands, which at first glance might seem more expensive, but the dramatically better fuel economy of e.g. a tiny hybrid or even plain gas car quickly adds up, and in states with cheap electricity combined with scheduled charging at off-peak times, the scales are tilted even further if you have a plug-in hybrid or full EV. The up-front cost is higher, but you quickly make that back from not having to haul the big gas hungry SUV or truck around all over the place.
What are you talking about? The Nissan Leaf was the world's best-selling electric car until 2020, outselling all Tesla's until Tesla Model 3 surpassed it. Are you trying to claim with a straight face that electric cars weren't being used en masse until 2020?
> No it’s not. “Range anxiety” was a constant refrain for anything mentioning electric cars during the first 20 years of the century.
I don't think you are being serious. "Rage anxiety" was literally GM propaganda to throw FUD at electric cars.
https://www.jalopnik.com/how-gm-will-use-fear-to-sell-you-a-...
A business plan that the real Tesla founders actually came up with because they'd seen Silicon Valley homes with Porsches and Prius parked next to each other and thought they could combine those two things?
If you had said this in 2015, we would be nodding along
> What we clearly know is that using software development methodologies to building critical hardware is as a bad idea as it sounds.
This methodology is what provides high speed, low latency internet to the South Pole and every other spot on earth allowed by regulatory.
I mean they did a fine job there, but nothing to write home about IMHO.
And on the topic of reusability I can't really find much info besides that it is just partially reusable. Not sure what the point of it actually is. I guess what matters is the launch price?
The question I still have it, wasn't SpaceX supposed to get USA back on the moon? And I heard they got billions in subsidies but have nothing to show for it.
AFAICT, SpaceX are not the bottleneck holding this back. Or at least, not the only one.
And they do have something to show for it, just not a complete final version. Starship is not yet fully reusable, and I will not make any bet on if they even can make it so as this is not my domain, but if you skip the re-use it is already capable of yeeting up a massive payload to LEO, enough to do a lunar mission.
It’s a commercial launch company. Of course the price matters and it being so much cheaper than the trash from ULA, Russia, etc is why there has been an explosion in new space endeavors (see the bandwagon launches).
> Nothing special about them. NASA could have made their own but someone decided it needs to be outsourced.
“Anyone could have done it bro,” is such an ignorant response. Nobody did it and there was the entire launch industry to collect if they did.
Even if NASA could have, they were derelict of duty in enabling space utilization because they never did it.
> And I heard they got billions in subsidies but have nothing to show for it.
Should probably check stuff before you repeat it. SpaceX has not received billions in subsidies for going to the moon. It did win a contract to do it, which as the name implies has required deliverables.
Its a private startup. It may operate on a loss, leveraged by private equity and government contracts.
Everything else you mention becomes irrelevant. Until we know the costs and operational margins, there is no certainty if they are delivering what they promised.
Also it seems you conflate "making money" with being profitable - its not the same thing. A private company can easily "massage" the PNL sheet to present itself as at a break-even point, and some back-of-the-napkin calculation seems to point to it. Granted, I may be wrong, but the fact is we don't know for sure.
You also seem to not be aware that there are multiple internet satellite providers with south pole coverage, as well as other regions in the globe.
None of this is correct. You don’t get fidelity as an investor repeatedly publishing fraudulent documents.
Also, it’s not like spacex can hide costs. There is no other supply of money to cover operations.
> You also seem to not be aware that there are multiple internet satellite providers with south pole coverage, as well as other regions in the globe.
They are a joke. Completely different leagues of access. Coverage of the South Pole (not McMurdo) got effective continuous bandwidth around the throughput of dialup and periodic passes from a polar sat to upload scientific data.
GEO is absolutely terrible in terms of latency and cost. Starlink is currently the only good option for the entire ocean and any remote place on earth not reachable by fiber infra.
The only up and coming potential competitor is Amazon’s Kuiper/Leo. China is also experimenting here but it’s not clear that will be available to the world.
Claiming there are alternatives to Starlink is extremely ignorant. It only takes a brief glimpse of what it’s doing to both maritime and aviation to understand that it’s unique.
Did I say they were fraudulent? I'm merely stating that tag price means nothing, as they probably are "selling" it at a loss (btw the initial projected falcon price was 10 mil per launch, and the current tag price is ~60 mil, with no strong stats nor costs on reusability). The only way to know for sure is to have access to privileged info behind an NDA. Do you even know what you're talking about? Have you ever reviewed this kind of documents?
> They are a joke. Completely different leagues of access. Coverage of the South Pole (not McMurdo) got effective continuous bandwidth around the throughput of dialup and periodic passes from a polar sat to upload scientific data.
South pole coverage is relevant for like, 3 people. None of the data collected from/to there requires urgency; there is zero scientific advantage other than quality-of-life. Consider this, we receive scientific data from mars.
> GEO is absolutely terrible in terms of latency and cost. Starlink is currently the only good option for the entire ocean and any remote place on earth not reachable by fiber infra.
Remote places tend to have no coverage, because they have no subscribers. Not sure what you think a profitable business is, but you come off as really asinine. There is nothing inherently unique to starlink - except the fact that they're polluting LEO with their garbage. If its sustainable or not, time will tell.
I miss the morning delivery of milk to the doorstep. And the milk carts that used to deliver it
Battery tech was way off on price/performance needed for commuting, until around Tesla happened: https://ourworldindata.org/battery-price-decline
IIRC, similar issues with compact powerful electric motors, but I don't have a chart handy for that.
I am an old man.
In my youth we called this lies. Or investor deception.
Some would even go as far as calling what he claims fraud but hey...
CEOs should have a reasonable grasp of what's possible for their team on a given short/medium timeline.
It won't be perfect but should be ballpark.
Elon and those like him make these statements with no reference to realistic project delivery timelines, business capacity or anything else - despite having all of that information readily available.
That's not a best guess, it's making shit up.