For a huckster he’s doing a damn good job of fake shipping fake cars to fake customers who fake drive them in fake public. Excellent scam, would invest again.

Don't be so disingenuous. Nobody is claiming the cars don't exist, the point is that Musk continuously makes insane, overreaching predictions that almost never come to pass, like the ludicrous "three months maybe, six months definitely" fully autonomous driving nonsense, or promises that Model 3 production will be on track for x units per month when the actual numbers are half that, and so on.

This is so typical of any discussion about Musk - anyone who dares point out that he often just makes things up is met with derision from True Believers who are unable to accept that he isn't the superhero his PR team make him out to be.

You claimed that Elon is a huckster monorail salesman, a direct reference to an episode of the Simpsons involving a con job to sell a non functional and dangerous product to a gawping crowd.

That’s pretty much claiming that Elon is selling dodgy products that aren’t fit for purpose, and running off to Tahiti with the money. Yet we have Teslas that are widely loved by their owners, with many owners buying a second one because the other car is perceived as a punishment after driving the Tesla.

Perhaps you would be met with less derision if you weren’t out to portray Elon as a real life Lyle Lanley. I know, it’s a pretty far fetched idea to suggest that you can look at Elon’s promises as coming from an enthusiastic leader inexperienced in a particular field: he’s confident that the goals will be achieved but is extremely optimistic about time. He promised the Model 3, it is here. He promised feature parity for AP2 and it’s pretty much there. He promised ramping production and that is coming.

No other manufacturer is producing electric vehicles in the same volume as Tesla, and no other manufacturer has ensured that the infrastructure is available to support common use cases for personal vehicles.

And here you are accusing Elon of being a con artist intent on siphoning money from gullible investors, then crying victim when you don’t receive the adoring praise you were expecting.

What have you accomplished with your life while Elon has been shooting rockets to Mars, solving South Australia’s electricity problems, and weaning the transport industry off oil?

What a shabby attempt at deflection. Do you have any intention at all of arguing honestly, or are you going to continue putting words in my mouth?

You can put your own words here and counter my arguments, nothing stopping you.

You seem too easily persuaded that Elon Musk is a con man.

Have you taken into account the massive empire he has already built - if he were truly as nefarious as you seem to imply, its hardly likely that he would've been able to effectively build rockets that land themselves, cars that drive themselves, alternatives to the oil-addiction we're all suffering under, etc.

I mean, put some balance in your argument: What has Musk done right, in your opinion? Anything at all?

Buying, or investing in, existing companies and then using his marketing skills to convince other investors (and governments) to pour billions of dollars into them is hardly the same thing as "building rockets that land themselves" - you can thank the engineers and visionaries at SpaceX for that. And his cars absolutely do not drive themselves despite his constant reassurances that they'll be able to do so Real Soon Now™.

In fact, as an aside, I would argue that Tesla's marketing is disgustingly misleading - their website loudly proclaims that all Teslas are equipped with every piece of hardware necessary for fully autonomous self-driving, and in a much smaller, much quieter voice they subtly admit that none of their cars are capable of actually doing that yet.

You may handwave that away as marketing fluff, but if you asked the average person in the street whether Teslas can drive themselves, 90% of them would say yes, of course they can, when in reality they're merely on par with other makes and models that have had the exact same driver assist features for years.

It's misleading at best, and lethal at worst - lives have been lost because drivers blindly placed their faith in autonomous driving features that simply do not work as implied. Go ahead and chalk that up to the drivers not being attentive enough, of course they share the bulk of the blame for not being in control of the vehicle they're driving, but it's hardly a surprise that many Tesla drivers have been lulled into a false sense of security by Tesla's marketing.

But again, nobody is arguing that Musk is running a straight up scam or that the products don't exist, the criticism is that he is constantly making promises and predictions he can't fulfil, constantly making claims that sound impressive until you look beneath the veneer, and whenever he is challenged to back up his assertions he either messily dodges the question or launches into yet another Twitter rant, and all the while his fans eagerly accept whatever he says without any care for objective reality.

If life were only about making claims one can fulfil, it'd be entirely boring and hardly worth any effort at all.

This predilection towards 'maximum correctness, always' seems to me to be a thinly veiled attempt at justifying totalitarianism. You don't get to the moon by doing everything you can not to break things - you get to the moon by not minding if things break, if it means you can improve conditions in life. We wouldn't have gotten to the moon, maybe, if the Apollo 1 incident didn't occur - perhaps if it hand't been so serious, it would have hamstrung the program later on in history. But, we learned from the incident, redesigned things, and radically improved the state of the art at the time.

The same is true now, of Elons' efforts - certainly he has made many big leaps in terms of projected goals and plans, but - so? Have you, with as much visor as you profess, not noticed the many, many times that Musk&co. have learned from their big mistakes, fixed things, and radically improved things as a result? How many times do there have to be big booms on the pad to satisfy your lust for self-introspection?

Nobody ever gets anywhere by saying "you know what would be good - if we just did the mundane, boring, safe things ..."

With that kind of mentality, we'd all be running Windows.

"Objective reality" is a fallacy. Objectively, we should've just stayed up in the trees. Subjectively, I'm glad there are individuals out there to push our species above the fray, all the while ignoring the sanctity of the mob.

...what on earth are you talking about? How is any of that relevant to any of the points I've made? Did I at any point state or even imply anything even remotely approaching "maximum correctness, always"? Did I advocate for "mundane, boring, safe things"? Are you going to address the actual points I made regarding Tesla's misleading marketing and the literal, actual deaths that have resulted from it?

Why is it so difficult to hold any kind of honest discussion with Muskovites on the subject of his intentionally misleading claims and absurd pie-in-the-sky overreaches? What drives you to make excuses for a loudmouthed anti-worker billionaire who has so constantly and consistently failed to live up to his promises?

By arguing that Elon is lying when he is only mis-estimating timelines, you are directly advocating maximum correctness always. Elon suggests a timeline of 6 months for self driving, turns out it will be closer to 6 years but it will still be delivered. But as far as you are concerned this is hucksterism equivalent to selling people lethal monorail carriages.

The deaths that have occurred have been due to people misusing the product, and one of those occurred in exactly the same situation as other fatalities involving vehicles being operated by attentive humans, with clearly define causes that have not been addressed by the maintainer of the roads.

The reason it is hard for you to have honest discussion with “Muskovites” is that you are intentionally exaggerating every failure and distorting every fact you touch, and making every argument an ideological statement.

You are the problem, not everyone else.

> I mean, put some balance in your argument: What has Musk done right, in your opinion? Anything at all?

The roads go without saying.

Promises to whom?

Any outrageous ambition I set for myself, fail and end up achieving 10x along the way is better than routinely setting mediocre goals and succeeding all the time, but achieving way less than the prior scenario.

'Failing upwards' has been a thing for a while now.

No. Especially no when you are manager or any kind of leader. It is either called lies or irrationality or delusion. I am sick of troubled messy projects that fail precisely because management cant admit to themselves that estimates should be higher.

Rational behavior is to reward those who make ambitious but realistic goals. Not those who get support on unrealistic lies.

Just because it feels good does not mean it is any less lie.

Nobody should sign up for a job they don't want to do.

Either its never too late to opt out of any cause.

So he's guilty of too optimistic estimations. Who isn't?

There's a huge difference between shipping a product and doing it profitably.

You should tell Bezos that.

Bezos can and does ship products profitably across multiple, disparate markets.

He simply reinvests the company's overall profits from each of Amazon's business lines into new business ventures.

Email sent!

You did see him launch his car into space, right?

So? You couldn't have illustrated my point any better: Musk is a showman, he's great at drumming up PR but not so great at actually running a profitable business or hitting any of the milestones he constantly promises he'll hit.

I think the point is that he's the CEO of both companies, and some of his wild claims were about building, launching and recovering rockets. Are we supposed to ignore SpaceX and just look at Tesla when considering Musk? You may consider that being a showman, and it was, but it was also showing his ability to delivery on some of his promises of rocket reusability.

Anyone basing their opinion of Musk purely on his role and publicity from one of these companies when they are both so very public is the height of confirmation bias, in either direction.

Yes, although it turns out their stream was using fake footage for one of the boosters

This is the closest that I've ever felt the need to call someone an idiot on the internet. Both boosters' feeds were fed from the same booster, i.e. we were seeing the same image twice. That is _not_ fake.

The footage itself was real video from a real camera, but the announcers said the footage was something different than it actually was. The YouTube _recording_ of the livestream was also edited after the fact without any mention that it no longer reflected the originally broadcast. While technically not 100% fake, I think at the very least it would be fair to call that misleading. If this is the closest you've ever come to calling someone on the internet an idiot, I applaud you for your restraint.

> I think at the very least it would be fair to call that misleading

You imply intent. There was no intent to deceive.