> "I am selling almost all physical possessions. Will own no house. [...] Don’t need the cash. Devoting myself to Mars and Earth. Possession just weigh you down."
> "Based on current trends, probably close to zero new cases in US too by end of April" (Posted Mar 2020)
Unbelievable, these are just the ones from a year ago. People that take him seriously, could you explain why you do?
His predictions on Crypto and BTC now seem even more ridiculous and pump'n'dump-y.
I'm not an Elon fanboy, it's just a little bizarre to me that people mark this guy up as a crazy liar who shouldn't be taken seriously, meanwhile many of his bold claims have actually resulted in advancing tech and science in staggering ways. Like, people were saying the same thing about his claim to land first stage boosters, and here we are.
Side note, apparently he is still actively selling off all his possessions.
F9 is also incredible and has made the impossible possible... and Starlink is one instance of that, which also exists and is usable.
You can't really highlight his failures without also giving credit where credit is due to his (and his organizations') successes.
I'm really curious how he gets such smart and talented people to work at his companies.
Meanwhile, Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy have made numerous successful and commercial launches and landings.
Also consider that it took NASA about 9 years to fully develop the Space Shuttle from ground up and they didn't lose a single vehicle during testing - 50 years ago!
This is not accurate: reusable orbital first stages is a SpaceX first, and the cost savings it yielded enabled Starlink, which is another SpaceX first (high speed, low-latency, low-altitude LEO satellite internet).
And how is it questionable? They've got the cheapest (for their class) launch prices in the world.
Elon says stupid things sometimes, but I would rather have most of the time, than more stupid manager talk from our German companies with their 'electrified intelligence' and AI in our dashboards (because they bind a GPS coordinate to a setting like Tesla).
Anyway, I really just wanted to point out that 50 years ago it was apparently possible to develop spaceships in less time without a "move fast and break things" approach.
Of course, so has every famous idiot.
That describes every user on this website...
Elon Musk is demonstrably very good at some things - in particular running companies. I can't think of any other person who has successfully started multiple billion dollar companies. Which isn't to say that they don't exist, but... (see next paragraph)
Elon Musk is also much more willing to speak his mind than most successful entrepreneurs (which is why you hear about him). Sometimes he is rather stupid (see paragraph 1), sometimes he is not. Often I think his statements (and to a large extent probably his actual opinions as well) are biased towards what is good for his companies. The information you can get from when he is not being stupid or overly biased is probably worth putting up with the stupid.
Finally he's just involved in a lot of cool technology... and however else you feel about him you have to admire him remaining that involved when he has more than enough money to fuck off and retire.
Maybe one way to drive home the point is to just answer a lot of yes/no questions about him:
Do I think he's overselling autopilot, yes. Do I think he's wrong about bitcoin, yes. Do I think he's wrong about how to run companies, I mean probably also yes, but on average less wrong than basically anyone else talking about it, it's a complex topic but he is good at it. Do I think he's wrong about how to build rockets? Like the answer to companies. Do I think he's wrong about how to build factories? The same again. Do I think he intends to put people on mars? Yes. Do I think he will succeed? I put it at above 50% probability, which is far higher than I think of anyone else. Do I think we will get his self sustaining city? Almost certainly not. And so on and so on.
Its still a good skill picking winner in a hyper competitive environment, but he's closer to an average trust fund kid than a jobs or a page.
Steve Jobs did, I believe there are a couple others too. I agree though, the list is short.
Also they should also update the post about the 500k Teslas/year. 185K in Q121 places Tesla right inside 500k/year territory.
A while back, I was like "This Elon Musk guy is really an example of what we need more of in the world".
It makes me cringe.
This was the days of solar rooftiles, Boring company, going to mars soon, the hyperloop, battery technologies, self driving vehicles.
All of it was complete horseshit.
The worst thing of all is that, I can hold my hands up and be laughed at but since then there are armies of Elon fans that don't recognise it.
In for a penny, in for a pound.
EDIT: Even on hackernews, there are people with this fetish. "It isn't his fault, the public is to blame for thinking that fully automated self driving cars, meant fully automated self driving cars". Ugh.
The difference is he has been involved with three large successes - ebay, telsa, and spacex. This success/failure ratio is leagues better than just about anyone else. And he did this in three very different industries.
So his self driving car effort will likely fail, or at best be very late.
But we do need more people willing to take chances like this who can also execute as this is rare.
The thing people need to realize is that people can start hitting misses at any time.
Elon Musk is perhaps a con man (in the fully expounded sense of the term "confidence man"), but particularly one who believes his own bull.
If he wasn't like that, he might not have done some of the worthwhile things he's done. I definitely wouldn't take anything he says at face value, but I think there's value in him being like that.
Consider Toyota. 25 years ago their upper management was capable of fostering the development of hybrids. Now they seem to be unable to change direction.
VW is doing a better job. Probably because Germany threw some of the previous management in prison.
Im a fan of what he was. Not a fan of what he has become.
Like:
> "Building 100 Starships/year gets to 1000 in 10 years or 100 megatons/year or maybe around 100k people per Earth-Mars orbital sync"
That's still the plan, and they're actively working toward that goal, and no deadline was set.
From what I can tell, the ones that are jokes are the ones he said a few times but made no progress towards. Like the self driving ones. And the ones where he throws paying customers his product killed under the bus.
I don't find that kind of joke funny.
Good question. For me personally it's always been obvious and I've yet to be wrong, other than the time he said he would drive cross country on autopilot by a certain date. He's very obviously been wrong on Autopilot/Full Self Driving dates. I read every tweet he writes and I have a good sense of his personality having watched most interviews with him since the early 2010s when I originally started following him via SpaceX.
> Like the self driving ones.
I don't think the self driving ones have been jokes. He just really underestimated the difficulty of it. He has many times tempered his well known self driving tweets with less talked about tweets talking about 9s of reliability and how hard it is. People naturally only see his most wild claims reposted the most so assume most of what he says is the wild claims when that's generally a tiny minority.
And they have been making progress towards it. The system as of a few years ago compared to the system today is dramatically different. At current rates they're probably 2 years or so away from a system that matches Waymo's system, but works almost everywhere in the US, not just one city.
> And the ones where he throws paying customers his product killed under the bus.
To be honest... I'm on the side of Tesla on these. I'm not a fan of blaming a company when people misuse a product that's gated behind warning labels that say to not use it improperly. So when people die and he says "people shouldn't have been using the product this way" he's right, they accepted the risk when they turned the feature on past the warnings.
Directly relevant to the OP:
> 714 days since Elon Musk said there will be a million fully autonomous Tesla robotaxis in a year.