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Gigapress has almost nothing to do with Tesla. It is just the name given by Tesla to a process they purchase from a third party vendor(Idra Group). Tesla was the first to use this product for large scale automotive production though.

You say that like they bought something off the shelf which just worked the first time they used it. They did not - it was a collaboration and Tesla spent a lot of money and time to get it to work.

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.

Musk's behaviors should be separated into before drugs and after drugs. Since the day he smoked pot on camera, it's been all downhill.

Well reasoned.

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

> all paid for by global satellite internet revenue.

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”.

I dont think Starlink can actually make money without government subsidies and a whole lot of inactive users. It simply cannot scale, the width spot beams are limited by physics - they cannot get small enough to get the density needed.

I think that's the point? I'd always assumed Starlink was a way to fill in coverage gaps in low-density areas where cable would cost more than it was worth, not cities?

He didn’t need to watch Handmaid’s Tale. He grew up in 1970s South Africa and has never accepted that this model of society lost.

He and Thiel claim South Africa’s current government is engaged in genocide against whites, but they have never criticized apartheid.

On that front an interesting read is: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jan/26/elon-musk...

Supposedly the South African side of his family is actually pretty reasonable - it's the Canadian side that had the virulent racists.

> Huh? You think starlink is funding space-x?

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.

The irony of the biggest welfare queen in the world being worshipped by libertarian tech bros is too much sometimes.

Dude, nobody with a brain thinks he would have succeeded without the subsidies and support, but that still doesn't invalidate his achievements.

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.

> 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.

That's very silly. Weed doesn't turn people into habitual liars. Secondly, he was abusing drugs before that interview. Thirdly, he was telling absurd lies before that interview too. The hand wringing about him smoking a blunt is absurd, he doesn't have "reefer madness".

It's not the weed that fried his brain, it's the ketamine. That moment where he smoked up on camera seems to coincide pretty well with him losing his mind, though.

He was also combining ambien and wine. I don't know what that does to somebody's brain, but probably nothing good..

People get ketamine treatments for depression all the time. It's not drugs, he's just a nasty person who's been good at manipulating people in the past. People have just finally caught on to the con, at least in part because he's terminally online.

It's been obvious since the submarine incident.

I've used ketamine, it's not like you use it once and it destroys your mind.

Using it nightly for a few months though? The effect on your brain looks like CTE.

> it's that he profitably manufactured decently reliable cars for a price that lots of people found attractive.

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.

> Nearly all of his profit was government subsidies designed to push EV adoption

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]