Mostly, it just that like any CEO, he will always paint the situation in the best light possible. "Semi is coming next year", "Model X deliveries will start in 2015" etc.

The going-private-at-420 thing was reckless, and he's paid the price for that.

But I don't think its accurate to brand him a serial liar. He's just doing what a CEO does.

"He's just doing what a CEO does."

I disagree. At a certain point, Musk turned the corner and became delusional. It's beyond simple boasting now.

I'm not a cultist but certainly a fan boy. You try innovating and putting a time box on it.

You need to be optimistic and a little crazy to think you know better.

A projection is always a messy mix of what you know at the time combined with your own emotional temperament and wiring. I think the big debate on Elon is if he's a serial liar or a serial optimist who's often wrong.

At some point, people realize that they are underestimating their projections and that leads them to re-calibrate expectations with stakeholders. In this case, there is no re-calibration, which leads "non-believers" to think he is a serial liar. The answer is likely in-between, he knows he underestimates it and he is aware that if he doesn't do so, there wont be enough pressure on the employees and the money would likely dry up fast.

>The answer is likely in-between, he knows he underestimates it and he is aware that if he doesn't do so, there wont be enough pressure on the employees and the money would likely dry up fast.

But that's the point, isn't it? We have a word for intentionally providing falsehoods to investors to get them to keep giving you more money.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not cultist. I agree w/ you that what is going on with the SEC seems reckless, and I don't like it. There are a number of things Musk has done that I definitely don't agree with. (However, I wouldn't call him a serial liar. He may exaggerate or stretch claims as many CEOs do.)

That doesn't change the fact that he's produced a great car and seriously innovated in many areas.

I am rooting for them to succeed because I think what they are doing is important and good for humanity. I am hoping Musk does the right thing, and doesn't get in further trouble with the SEC, etc. And I am hoping that the company is able to survive the tumult of the markets -- that is, the costs associated with electric cars and the supply/demand of the market. Sometimes the best technology doesn't win. It happens often. It would be a huge loss if it didn't work out.

I've noticed the people who call him out for being dishonest are the same people who continually misquote him, claiming he "promised" things that he said were "expected" or "likely."

I'd go the other way: HN users bend over backwards to give the guy the benefit of the doubt, which he then sets on fire.

He just held an event for Tesla investors called "Autonomy Day" at which he went on at great length about how Tesla robotaxis will autonomously ferry passengers around, anywhere they want to go, as a running, regulator-approved, income-producing service, by next year. There is zero chance of this occurring and he knows it.

This is a perfect example. He said it could happen, pending regulatory approval that Tesla does not control, in certain locales, possibly with human supervisory drivers at the beginning, not at, but by (a different word with a different meaning) the end of next year. He had so many qualifiers on his statements, yet you missed every single one of them and came up with a totally different statement you just projected and attributed to him. Did you even listen to the event? This is basic listening comprehension 101.

Edit: ok you got the word "by" right but... everything else... wow. But it's not just you... the crazy thing is how many people do the same thing.

Regulations are not the problem here. He is clearly trying to imply something about his technology that, given the reality of self driving cars, can not happen next year even if everything else went positivity for him. The fact that he is using caveats around regulation etc. doesn't get him off the hook. He knows people will report the story as some amazing breakthrough that will help pump stock and sell cars. It's dishonest.

> given the reality of self driving cars, can not happen next year even if everything else went positivity for him.

Why is that? They've now got tens if not hundreds of thousands of cars running their FSD tech all the time comparing it to what the driver actually does and using that to get edge cases to add their every growing dataset to test and train their algorithms. The average American has a commute of 16 miles [0] which gives an estimate 13173 miles driven per car by the end of next year. At a low estimate of 10,000 cars, that would give them a subset of driving data for 131,733,333 miles driven. Presumably, they label these interactions with what should have been done and then throw it into a training/test pipeline. The US car fatality rate is just over 1 per 100,000,000 miles driven [1] so they should have a training/test suite multiple times the US car fatality rate and that's not even counting regular crashes. Granted, it won't actually be that large since they don't report back when the car is running fine, but I don't see why it is 100% impossible for them to get their FSD tech to human quality driving in certain conditions (like geofenced and only run during nice weather) at some point next year when they have that much data to work with.

[0]: https://itstillruns.com/far-americans-drive-work-average-744...

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

There's a lot more problems involved than just data collection. The algorithms do not exist to safely and reliably solve these problems even with all the data in the world. Simply put Tesla is declaring it can do something with a restricted set of sensors and compute that the current state of the art in research doesn't support. Even Waymo who have no real production restrictions and can spend >$100k in equipment per car and have a lot more compute is not claiming anything like this will be feasible in the next year. He is claiming cheaper, faster and better than anyone else.

The problems just get harder and harder as you move from a nice controlled environment like a freeway and even there Tesla has shown there are many issues with the system where a driver needs to pay full attention for it to be safe.

From first hand experience with these problems and their complexity I fully expect a slightly better version of autopilot to be delivered and Musk to declare success despite it not being anywhere close to an autonomous fleet of Tesla robo-taxis and justify the difference with the caveats he quietly snuck in that he knew wouldn't make headlines.

That might be enough for his customers and investors so from a business sense it might pay off.

Can you give some examples of those problems because you are coming off as very hand-wavy about it?

Simple case that Waymo etc still struggle with is making a left turn through an intersection or an unprotected left. Even something as common and predictable as crossing oncoming traffic that humans do every day is still causes disengaments for these cars. Cruise has a team just focused on issues at intersections. Throw in some pedestrians and this is very hard. Humans can intuit a lot from a pedestrians behavior that these cars just cannot handle. Is someone standing by the corner or about to walk into the street? People do a lot of weird unpredictable things in downtown areas. Tesla has done ok with the easiest part of driving, freeways, with the support of an attentive human but three are still many reported problems. Moving on to complex environments with multiple moving actors at such high reliability that it is a hands free production-grade system in 1-2 years is not likley, but good luck to them.

Isn't that the exact type problem that massively benefits from having tons of real world data because they will have examples to train their neural nets for practically every possibility?

Not really. Neural nets are good at detection and classification problems for objects in the environment but they are not a panacea. Assuming a neural net is good enough to detect everything a car will see (for pedestrians this isn't the case) path planning while predicting behavior of other actors is still a very difficult unsolved problem.

securities fraud is an ill defined, broad category, probably happens more than jay walking.