Musk isn't super-human. He's a good engineer with great intuition for how to solve hard problems and a good "first principles" approach. He also has a great work ethic. There are tons of Elon Musks around.

What's rare is people as visionary and competent as him who are also rich and well-connected. Having someone who actually knows something in a position to make decisions about the allocation of large amounts of capitol yields results so amazing that they appear super-human, which buys him a hell of a reality distortion field and a lot of slack for being eccentric.

Musk got rich more or less by accident. The systems that advance people to those heights select for competence in the areas of social and financial advancement, not practical engineering or creativity, hence his rarity.

Of course today it's probably better than it ever has been in all of history. Historically the way to wealth and power was to brainwash a large number of people into killing (and risking their lives) for you and then sitting back and reaping the reward. That's still a thing, but at least now there are other routes.

I used to think like you, then I see these driverless demonstrations and negotiated left turns with zero user interaction.

I have this feeling that we will be surprised like we were when AlphaGO won...

1. Be robust to bad visibility, not an easy task in computer vision.

2. Have access to extremely detailed maps that include things like driveways and parking lots. These maps would need to be continuously updated. The labor required to make and maintain such maps will limit how many places cars can be fully autonomous.

3. Understand the etiquette of the road. For example, a person seeing a car stop in the street near a parking spot would assume the car is about to parallel park and give it room to pull off the maneuver. An autonomous vehicle wouldn't give it so much room, because it can't reason about context in that way.

4. Negotiate ambiguous situations requiring interaction with other drivers. There are frequently situations where it's not clear who has the right of way from the rules of the road. People resolve these by gesturing with their hands and with their cars. A fully autonomous vehicle would need to understand these signals.

One might easier imagine cars communicating with one another over a local connection of some sort.

If we want to optimize for reducing bullshit, the stock market and rules around it need to be restructured.

None of which are honest about how things have progressed.

> Tesla Ticker Symbol + "Q" which is the NASDAQ notation for bankruptcy

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

Tesla had a battery swapping but realized it was a terrible idea and instead built the largest global chairing network in the world instead. Are you seriously gone shit on somebody because they changed strategy with more information and build something that is actually more impressive?

Yes, he was wrong about Robotaxi, or at least its delayed. Nobody bats 100%.

But if you are actually honest with yourself and start in 2000 and look what he said, compared to what he did. Literally nobody else on the planet predictions are closer to what actually happened in terms of large scale problems.

Ensuring said bad press is accurate/fair is certainly not the primary goal.

Disclaimer: I don't own any TSLA stock.