Hacker News Reader

He often promises incredibly ambitious things that don't happen. But, with a fairly reasonable frequency, he promises incredibly ambitious that do happen.

For example, SpaceX is responsible for a massive spike in orbital launches [1].

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/yearly-number-of-objects-...

View on HN

SpaceX and Tesla are both successful companies doing really impressive things, but the more ambitious claims are almost always silently discarded.

Including robotaxis, tesla semi-trucks, hyperloop, optimus, roadster 2.0, cheap whole home batteries, true FSD, Mars landing, nueralink, and more I'm sure.

It is difficult for me to get excited about a decades long, ambitious project when the follow through rate is <10%.

Several of these do exist already, and one of them was never a promised project. This objection seems like it's from 2016.

He is definitely overly optimistic on timelines but pretty much all those things you mentioned are actually still happening, it's too early to say they haven't followed through.

Only because of gov't handouts

Gwynne Shotwell is the one that makes it happen at SpaceX. She has a pretty good track record so far so I'm not writing her off yet.

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com