SpaceX wins lots of space contracts with the help of Musk's "Occupy Mars" marketing.

Tesla sells lots of cars on the promise of self-driving in the marketing.

Musk bought BTC, single-handedly pumped the price of BTC, and then sold at a huge profit.

I don't think he's a genius but Musk is definitely not stupid. He's just not playing the obvious game you think he's playing.

And denying covid kept workers in his factory, against the law.

I think there needs to be some rule in discussion that as soon as you start arguing over if someone is dumb or evil, you have to stop. It's impossible to figure out which (or what mix) it actually is.

Acting that dumb when you literally employ a huge team of top-notch rocket scientists to advise you is absolutely evil.

> I think there needs to be some rule in discussion that as soon as you start arguing over if someone is dumb or evil, you have to stop.

I really like this, and I propose it be called "Kulak's Law".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor is basically the same thing

Also the word "kulak" is loaded - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kulak

> And denying covid kept workers in his factory, against the law

not sure if there even can be a complete list with Musk but, let's also add:

1) privileged background thanks to emerald mining fortune made in apartheid South Africa,

2) union-busting and abusive employer,

3) hoarding $175.6 billion in stolen wages during a pandemic,

4) encouraged a coup

> 3) hoarding $175.6 billion in stolen wages during a pandemic,

I hadn't seen this before. Do you have an article diving into this number?

Wait, did you not just do that above, calling Musk not that bright?

As far as I know, when I made my first comment we weren’t yet debating dumb vs evil.

It was practically an invitation to though.

Clearly they don't pay attention to what they say.

If you've done what Elon Musk has done, you're definitely not dumb.

That's what I hate about people telling Trump is dumb. If you've done what he has done, he's definitely not dumb.

Funny thing is that although I never liked Paris Hilton, I was pretty sure she was not that dumb (turned out she wasn't).

The same story when I look at my Facebook feed. Plenty of smart people have all kinds of different views on Covid and vaccination. And all of them call the 'other group' dumb.

Seems like political viewpoints have nothing to do with being smarter than someone else.

If it's true to say that there are different types of intelligence, then it's true to say that there are different types of dumb

Interesting comment. Never quite thought about it that way.

If you started your adult life with the same help from Daddy that Trump had - and did nothing, literally besides putting all of that money into an index fund - you’d be richer than Trump is today. They did the math.

So what exactly are Trump’s accomplishments? It’s not like the dude started off selling hot dogs. He made a lot of shitty investments, lost a lot of money, and is one of the few people on this planet capable of bankrupting a casino. In Vegas.

Yes he’s famous, of course, but his “look at me I’m a successful billionaire” image is all smoke and mirrors.

Tesla would have been dead if he had not brought the Fremont factory back online. I give him credit for this, as I think ignoring the “rules” was one of the smartest business moves ever made in 2020.

Would you think the same way if it was your life on the line? Not livelihood. Live.

I think when evaluating situations compassion for people's lives is a more important matter than economical wellbeing. (Even if it's their wellbeing)

Most of his workers were in an age group at negligible risk from covid; they'd be more likely to die in a road accident driving home.

How many of those workers have friends and/or relatives who are part of a vulnerable demographic?

Nobody's forcing them to associate with vulnerable friends or relatives. And it's not like they don't have a choice; tech workers aren't exactly poor.

What do tech workers have to do with a car factory?

Workers at a Tesla factory are high-skilled and highly paid, it's not some third-world sweatshop.

OR driving to the funerals of their parents, grandparents, friends, neighbors, and other loved ones and acquaintances who they infected with COVID-19.

Wow, people here really hate statistics. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10654-020-00698-1... ; if you're aged under 34 (as are the majority of tech workers), in the USA you're almost ten times more likely to die from "other acccidental fatalities" (0.0032) than covid if you catch it (0.004). Note that to assess risk the covid IFR there should be multiplied by the chance of catching it, to make it more comparable with the other columns, so if the chance of catching covid is less than 50%, then overall you're also more likely to die in a traffic accident.

You are making a strong point for further lockdowns.

Traffic accidents decrease, other accidental fatalities decreases, the number of people who catch covid decrease in a lockdown.

>Traffic accidents decrease, other accidental fatalities decreases, the number of people who catch covid decrease in a lockdown.

What's the point of being alive if you can't live life? Fine if you choose that for yourself, but you're a monster if you'd dare to assume you have the right to confine everybody else to such a miserable existence.

Marx has a great quote along those lines:

"The human body is mortal by nature. Hence illnesses are inevitable. Why does a man only go to the doctor when he is ill, and not when he is well? Because not only the illness, but even the doctor is an evil. Under constant medical tutelage, life would be regarded as an evil and the human body as an object for treatment by medical institutions. Is not death more desirable than life that is a mere preventive measure against death? Does not life involve also free movement? What is any illness except life that is hampered in its freedom? A perpetual physician would be an illness in which one would not even have the prospect of dying, but only of living. Let life die; death must not live. Has not the spirit more right than the body?"

It's a good thing not everyone has such disregard and lack of empathy for their fellow humans. I'm guessing you're Libertarian, not Communist, right?

It's good that not everybody has such flagrant disregard for human rights; I'm guessing you're a Democrat?

The risk of Covid has never been the individualized risk. It's the collective risk of what happens when hospitals and ICUs reach capacity when too many people catch Covid at once. For example, what is happening in India.

This was widely known in the US on the first week of March in 2020.

When hospitals reach capacity, people in their 40s and 50s become much more likely to die from Covid. Lots of preventable loss of life is going to occur, from Covid and from everything else that can't be attended to because the hospitals are full.

The point of lockdowns is not to reduce the individual risk. It's to reduce the collective risk of getting hit by a runaway train that completely overwhelms our health systems.

>For example, what is happening in India.

What is happening in India? The death rate per capita there is still way less than in the US or UK. How come the death rate in Florida is less than that in California and New York, in spite of no lockdowns and an older population in Florida?

There's no statistical evidence that countries with stricter lockdowns had a lower death rate than those without.

I think it's well understood that deaths in India are massively underreported.

California and New York both came close to having their health care systems overwhelmed in certain counties, Florida did not. That's exactly my point.

> There's no statistical evidence that countries with stricter lockdowns had a lower death rate than those without.

Honestly, you would expect it to be the other way around. Lockdowns are a last-resort tool to prevent healthcare systems from being overwhelmed. You would expect areas that implement lockdowns to be either denser (thus, hypothetically having less warning time between rising case counts and hospital saturation) or, more likely, to have an existing large scale Covid problem that they need to get under control.

Lockdowns are correlated with bad Covid outcomes because lockdowns are implemented in places that are liable to, or are already having, bad Covid problems.

The signals I'm seeing from India strongly suggest that their death rate is massively under-reported.

http://www.healthdata.org/special-analysis/estimation-excess...

Death rate per capita I think is a misleading way to look at it. If covid wipes half of my say 10 ppl family and half of someone else’s say 4 ppl family, I lose 5 ppl and they lose 2 ppl. Per capita rate is fine for statisticians after the fact. But during the pandemic you can’t tell me we lost same ppl per capita. Obviously I lost much more (hypothetically)

I've got some bad news for you: Tesla died in 1943.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikola_Tesla#Death

If Tesla died, the major automakers would probably abandon EVs.

Does the industrial effort to decarbonize our economy really matter? Is it urgent? Is it essential?

I'm fairly certain it was not in violation of "the law", but rather in violation of edicts from unelected officials.

"The law" gives public health officials authority to issue those "edicts". Try taking them to court and see how far that gets you. Hint: not very.

Some people seem to have done pretty well in court bringing a case against unconstitutional edicts: https://www.npr.org/2021/04/10/986010977/supreme-court-rules...

Restricting religion and regulating a factory are pretty different. The first runs directly afoul of the constitution, while the second is clearly within the purview of regulators and public health officials.

I was thinking of Jacobson v Massachusetts in my original comment, which upheld state and local governments' broad authority in public health.

Here's a balanced view of the powers affirmed in Jacobson and how that has changed over time to better protect individual liberty: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1449224/

Note however that applies to individuals, not factories or places of business which are subject to much more regulation.

Ironically, I believe this was overturning a law made by elected officials (on constitutional grounds)

Well, given how nobody was prosecuted, taking it to court seems unnecessary, which was my point.

If that was your point, you did a poor job of making it.

Not being prosecuted is not the same as not guilty.

The California Executive Order creating a shutdown was issued by the Governor, who is elected.

It makes me so sad that it's impossible to have a polite conversation these days without clinical paranoids popping in at every juncture to say, "COVID is a hoax! Public health officials are frauds! Medicine is meaningless!"

Huh?

> He's just not playing the obvious game you think he's playing.

I think I would agree with that.

Take note of that last part of his tweet[0]:

> Tesla will not be selling any Bitcoin and we intend to use it for transactions as soon as mining transitions to more sustainable energy. We are also looking at other cryptocurrencies that use <1% of Bitcoin’s energy/transaction.

Here he posed a problem that is now on people's mind. Soon he will offer a solution and people will go nuts about it. He often does that kind of thing.

[0] https://mobile.twitter.com/elonmusk/status/13926020410258432...

So you mean starting his own crypto?

He will sell an all in one renewable energy crypto mining pods or similar.

>Musk bought BTC, single-handedly pumped the price of BTC, and then sold at a huge profit.

Doesn't this have legal ramifications when done in the stock market? If it is shady for that market, why is it acceptable in other markets? Oh, right, they're not regulated.

> Oh, right, they're not regulated.

Wasn't that one of the big selling points of BTC?

Cryptocurrency is almost completely unregulated, so no there are not likely to be ramifications. It's anarchy and just about anything goes. Buyer beware.

Also I didn't get the sense that Musk single-handedly pumped BTC. He jumped on the bandwagon about mid-way through the current pump. I am still foggy on what kicked off the current bull run.

The daily volume of BTC is above 50 billion. The cap is over a trillion. This is not a fundamental movement but a value based / perception one.

The SEC doesn’t consider Bitcoin a security, so it can’t be securities fraud. Also there usually must be lies (or intentional omissions) involved to prosecute these things, and I don’t think either of those apply here.

Telling people that you bought a certain stock isn't illegal wtf. Have you watched CNBC or Bloomberg? They have hedge fund operators come in and praise or criticize stocks that they have bought or sold short.

It is when you do it for the purposes of market manipulation.

Intent matters, which also makes market manipulation so difficult to prove.

Allowing people to buy cars in bitcoin and telling people might be.

Then maybe Satya Nadella should've been put in prison first. https://www.marketwatch.com/story/microsoft-starts-accepting...

Start with the guy who started accepting bitcoin for pizza.

https://ln.pizza/myfirstbitcoinpizza/

pwning libertarians is ok in my books!

(ooooh, was there lead in your hamburger? just the price of freedom, I guess! if you don't like it, you can go eat fiat hamburgers like the plebes.)

lead in your hamburger is illegal in both libertarian legal frameworks and non-libertarian legal frameworks.

liberty: intentionally or intentionally harming people is illegal. If you or your company poison someone, you are held responsible for the harm you caused.

non-liberty: a specific regulation about the level of acceptable lead in meat. limited liability shields the owners from being held responsible.

It's not illegal to sell a security after disclosing that you own that security.

I don't even have to point to any specific laws, just look at all the websites that talk about stocks operating without any SEC intervention.

It is illegal to "pump and dump" a security.

I have a hard time believing the people here defending Musk dont know this, and can't see how his behaviour _migbt_ qualify as a pump and dump.

1. Tell someone you own a security 2. They get excited and buy it 3. You sell it when it goes up

You can't just classify this set of actions as a pump and dump. You have to do something that is considered a scam, such as grossly misrepresenting the security with the intention of making a profit at the cost of uneducated investors. As far as I can tell, Elon never claimed Bitcoin is environmentally friendly, nor did he make other false claims about Bitcoin's functionalities or capabilities.

Except Bitcont isn't a security, so there are no laws against "Pump and Dump" in the unregulated market.

Some would argue that Bitcoin is fundamentally a giant "Pump and Dump" anyway, so nothing to see here.

Sure, but what you're basically saying is "what Musk did isn't illegal because the thing he did it against isn't considered a security"

You may be technically correct, doesn't make it any less sketch or immoral

Pump and dump arguably isn't immoral. It's just using herd mentality, if it wasn't illegal people might actually try to think before they buy and sell.

> and then sold at a huge profit

No they didn't, according to the announcment:

>> Tesla will not be selling any Bitcoin and we intend to use it for transactions as soon as mining transitions to more sustainable energy.

Realistically we won't know until the Q2 financials are out.

Note the wording "*will not* be selling any Bitcoin" not "*has not* sold any Bitcoin". There were major dumps a couple minutes before Elon's announcement. It should be no surprise if Tesla front-run Elon's announcement, knowing that it would affect the price.

They'll keep a trivial amount on the financials, but I suspect the majority was off the books.

They will also use this an excuse to realize revenue in what will appear to be a very lean quarter. I mean they can't exactly sell to "test liquidity" again.

They are publically on record as having bought $1.5billion Bitcoin.

I don't think that counts as a trivial amount on the financials.

From their Q1 disclosure, Tesla made $272 Million from 'Proceeds from sales of digital assets' [1]. From the same disclosure, Tesla still holds $1,331 Million (~$1.3 Billion) of digital assets. As this is from their Q1 disclosure, they may have sold more since March 31st.

[1] https://ir.tesla.com/

Why do you need to own Bitcoin for transactions?

Someone wants to buy a 50k car. They give you 50k worth of Bitcoin. You immediately sell the Bitcoin for 50k of dollars.

At no time did you need to own Bitcoin before the transaction.

I read it as implying Tesla intends to use BTC for outgoing payments.

Of course, that would require Tesla's vendors to start accepting BTC. I strongly suspect LG Chem and Panasonic don't accept bitcoin payments.

Yep, plus one to this. A lot of people are quick to either rationalize his behavior as either awesome or stupid, but I think Musk is really a misunderstood mogul who's intention is to turn a profit, not deliver on his ridiculous worldview.

Can't it be both? You won't get anywhere today with a world view that doesn't integrate financialisation.

I certainly won’t argue that Musk is stupid, but trust me, his Mars marketing has never won SpaceX a launch contract, and if anything it probably hurt them in the early days. This business was long dominated by stodgy defense giants, and it has seen a lot of wild-eyed idealists with big dreams and a little too much money come and go. Government and commercial launch contracts have never been awarded on the basis of idealistic excitement, and the conventional wisdom used to be that the SpaceX mentality just didn’t work in this Very Serious and Difficult Field.

In recruiting, on the other hand, the Mars marketing has helped them a lot.

While I really dislike some of his behavior, this goal post moving to try to deny Musk credit for what he's accomplished annoys me.

Before Musk we had no economical reusable launch systems, economical space flight was sci-fi, and in the 2000s there were many people who thought modern civilization must inevitably grind to a halt as we deplete oil because oil is absolutely irreplaceable for modern transport.

SpaceX built the first economical to operate reusable space hardware at any scale, and Tesla validated the market for EVs. Even if Tesla fails, without them I highly doubt the EV revolution would be happening. Traditional car companies would never have cannibalized their ICE sales with EVs without a hard kick in the ass to do so.

> and in the 2000s there were many people who thought modern civilization must inevitably grind to a halt as we deplete oil because oil is absolutely irreplaceable for modern transport

Lol, what an exaggeration. I don't think anyone argued seriously that we would have to stop using cars at all. The conversation was always about renewable energy.

Yes, those comments are right up there with the 'what have the Romans done for us' list.

Like him or hate him, no point denying Musk his achievements, which are more than many of us here will manage in our lifetimes and Musk appears to be far from finished. His biggest enemy at this point is himself, that unstable streak is a real worry. But here's to hoping that he will notch up a longer list of achievements.

As long as you're quoting Life of Brian:

"He's not the messiah, he's a very naughty boy!"

Hehe, he definitely is not the Messiah, and it is very well possible that he indeed is a very naughty boy.

For Musk being grounded will have a completely different meaning though :)

SpaceX is excellent.

EVs would have happened without Tesla. The "kick in the ass" is the same thing that has driven all other emissions improvements: government regulation.

Without Tesla those government mandates would have led to undesirable “compliance cars.” Tesla made EVs sexy and is why we now have an E-Mustang.

There is no reason to believe the former. Car companies have to comply while also selling cars.

They would have dragged their feet as much as possible to keep ICE alive. Too much car culture inertia and sunk cost. Being shown up is more powerful and motivating than regulations.

Yeah he has definitely helped push (and unwilling and petrol addicted) civilization a lot more towards EVs despite what the denialists want to have us think. However he's neither a messiah like the Muskavites would have us believe nor is he an evil mustache twiddling villain like the other side would have you believe.

In some ways he is the Donald Trump of Silicon valley. Just like many Americans failed to understand Trump, many in tech fail to understand Musk.

Isn't this just the same thing idiots did for Trump though? Look at whatever Trump does, and then find a reason in retrospect why actually that was a smart move.

SpaceX wins contracts because they are able to send payloads into space, nothing to do with marketing, and sending payloads into space isn't even that hard - they basically beat out Nasa who weren't allowed to compete and Boeing who can't send a plane to 30,000ft without fucking it up.

Tesla sells lots of cars because they're electric and Apple made battery technology cheap.

BTC has been running up and down far longer than Musk has been involved and it'll continue after he's gone.

If they are so easy, why isn't everyone doing it? Why can't Bezo put payloads into space with a billion every year invested? Why can't every other car manufacture seem to put together an electric car with the same range? I don't want to buy a Tesla, I'd rather something with physical knobs, but there's nothing that quite hits the mark yet.

> Why can't Bezo put payloads into space with a billion every year invested?

Because he was busy changing the face of consumer retail, the internet, and other huge aspects of society up to a few months ago. Give it a couple of years and you'll see Blue Origin eat SpaceX's cake.

> Why can't every other car manufacture seem to put together an electric car with the same range?

Mostly because other car manufacturers are very serious about not lying about things that are easily demonstrable like range. There's a reason Teslas are the only EV that no one can get the advertised range from, but all the other EVs crush their advertised ranges. Your question is "why doesn't every other car manufacturer lie psychopathically to the consumer?".

And other companies aren’t willing to sacrifice what Tesla is for range. It’s not like an egg is the best shape for an SUV and other companies just haven’t figured it out yet.

Give it a couple years? They have been at this longer than SpaceX has been and are about 10 years behind them.

Blue Origin is older than SpaceX.

Sending payloads reliably into orbit is incredibly difficult. Not sure if I missed some glaring joke/sarcasm here

Trump never actually accomplished anything unless you count ugly casinos that go bankrupt and a golf resort. There is nothing redeeming there to outweigh the bad stuff. There's just bad stuff.

If becoming billionaire and being elected president of the USA is "not accomplishing anything", then I'll start hoping I won't accomplish anything in my life.

I hope you don't incite any insurrections.

> and then sold at a huge profit

Are you sure he has sold?

Tesla sold 10% of their btc

before, not after the announcement.

He's a con artist, that's all

woah get a load of the philosopher over here guys.

No--there was no movment on electrical vechicles before his interest. That alone should be enough to put his image on a coin.

The first electric vehicle was developed in 1832, 24 years before Nikola Tesla was born, 139 years before Elon Musk was born.

https://www.energy.gov/timeline/timeline-history-electric-ca...

Please do not attempt to rewrite history. The electric vehicle has a long and storied history, and the modern revival was well underway in the 90s and 00s. Tesla Roadster was the first (I think?) highway-legal EV.

The Roadster was the first highway-legal EV to use a lithium-ion battery. The GM EV1 used 16.5 kWh of lead-acid batteries.

"and then sold at a huge profit."

I don't think musk/tesla has sold a single btc..

They sold ~270MM in Q1: https://www.coindesk.com/tesla-sold-bitcoin-in-q1-for-procee...

I mean you will see people here on this forum argue that bitcoin mostly uses up peak energy and unused capacity and such bullshit nonsense - it's frankly not that hard to spin a narrative that could sound plausable.

But then when you see people firing up coal plants in your back yard just to mine BTC (as opposed to China) reality suddenly kicks in and it's hard to spin bullshit arround that. Regulators are really dropping the ball on crypto - corporate entities should not be allowed to fuel this shit.

Yea--it's gotten out of hand. Hedge funds are being chastised for not getting in early enough. Crazy?

Why do I feel like lobbyists right now trying to kybash to any politician who even mentions regulations?

I heard one financial talking head say today that he's buying gold. If worse cone to worse at least he can make some jewelry.

I'm all for bitcoin, but wasting energy throughout the world seems wrong. And man's quest to make money knows no boundaries.

You see people firing up coal plants in your back yard? That's not an experience most people ever have.

Figurative, it's easy to ignore when those power plants get started in third world countries, when it's NY it's suddenly much harder to ignore the reality.

That's natural gas, not coal.

On the contrary. It's not that he's not bright, it's that is is a brilliant conman.

Re self-driving: Tesla's boom in the past ~1.5 years coincided with his laughable claims about self-driving and robo-taxis.

And re bitcoin: the guy literally tweeted two words "buy doge" and sparked a pump-and-dump bubble. Then he went on SNL, didn't plug doge enough, and it tanked instantly. Then a couple hours ago he tweeted more doge stuff and it started rallying again.

Crazy stuff.

He's single handedly accelerated the adoption of electric cars by 10 years while advancing literal rocket science to the point where launches will be done 10x cheaper.

For those of us who measure by outcomes, he's a genius.

> He's single handedly

Fun reminder, Musk did not start Tesla and bought his way into the company. His involvement should not be understated, but it's had years of management shuffles and changes of direction.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Tesla,_Inc.

I'd also note that SpaceX wouldn't be where it is today without Gwynne Shotwell.

Yes but he still stayed in there when everything was going to shit and got enough investors to keep the company alive and now the company is doing quite well.

No doubt, but he has been something special.

That's what you think. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_distortion_field

> He's single handedly

Tesla employs almost 80k workers, and SpaceX employs almost 10k. Elon might have had the idea, but it's the employees that made it possible and a reality.

Traditional car companies and traditional aerospace employ far more people, and those people are not dumb. Leadership matters.

I do agree that it isn't "single-handedly," but when I hear Elon speak he definitely does shout out to the team. I haven't heard him take 100% credit for these things.

> Elon might have had the idea,

and the money to convert the idea into execution with a high probability of losing his money.

Without Musk would that same group of people accomplished those things?

>accelerated the adoption of electric cars by 10 years

Did it really ? Tesla rode on the advances of battery tech driven by mobile devices, there were other EV efforts arround the time Tesla came up. I agree they recognised it early on and made it fasionable + they had this narrative driven market valuation which pressured other automotive execs to invest in the EV narrative. But 10 years is way too much - battery tech advancements were bound to bring us to this point even without Tesla R&D (I think they only started using their advancements recently, before that it was just stock batteries ?), and there was enough money in batteries from other markets to drive advancement without the EV push.

Not denying Tesla played a big positive role in this, but certainly not 10 years IMO.

> Did it really ?

Electric cars were a gimmick before Tesla, almost no-one was taking them seriously, after Tesla that changed.

Like I said - this shouldn't be attributed to Tesla as much as it can be attributed to battery advances. Tesla capitalised on it first and in the best way (with a luxury/aspiration car) and that's worth something for sure - but it's not like it made a breaktrough that would take others 10 years to figure out.

In fact "affordable" Teslas (model S) came after competition like Leaf which was a best seling electric car up until recently.

Sure, if you don't count the Chrysler TEVan, the Ford Ranger EV, the honda ev plus, the Toyota RAV4 EV...

also, if you ask me, a super expensive sports car should still count as a "gimmick". I give Tesla credit for reigniting excitement about EVs, but lets not oversell their achievement.

> Chrysler TEVa

The what?

> the Ford Ranger EV

The what?

> honda ev plus

The what?

> Toyota RAV4 EV

The what?

If you mention Tesla to literally anyone, they know about the cars. The product, and the marketing of it, have definitely brought EV's into the mainstream. Before that, very few consumers knew anything about EVs, maybe with the exception of the GM EV1. Now electric cars are a common sight on the road.

Back in the Tesla Roadster days it was basically something fans of supercars and a few geeks knew about.

Nisan Leaf was way more recognisable than a Tesla for a while.

And also things like Prius really prooved the point that electricity can be used to power cars.

Not knocking on Tesla, they have a great brand and helped spark interest and speed up demand for EVs. But saying they advanced the adoption of EVs by 10 years is ridiculous.

Honestly while I agree, I do think that Tesla did advance the adoption, purely by forcing it into the market so boldly with the model S. Other manufacturers were receiving government bailouts and messing around with smaller displacement city cars around 2010-2011, and brands like Karma started popping up along side Tesla and made a bit of disruptive noise to the big players.

I honestly don't think we'd have seen the same level of EV adoption by now if not for Tesla. But then I don't really know how to quantify it for arguments sake.

I don't think anyone denies Musk is a marketing genius.

Two of the best-selling electrical cars today either came out before Tesla had a mass-market car (Nissan Leaf, launched around the same time as an electric car) or are based on a platform that did (Renault Zoe; came out about the same time as the Model S, but its less successful sibling came out before the Model S).

Single handedly? I'll say the same as when people described Steve as a genius, he is an accomplished marketing machine but genius is reserved for the like of Einstein and Feynman. Do you think SpaceX and Tesla were Musk's idea? Or were they the recommendation of the MBAs hired to research subsidized industries with significant barrier to entry? It is not that he isn't successful but he is no genius, he just has the money to overcome, what otherwise would be, impossible hurdles. I am glad he's beating bezos to the punch though, it takes a special kind of business to make Walmart look like the good guys. I think Tesla is a horrible car, exactly the wrong vehicle to address the climate crisis but it seems we are addicted to the car and consider public transit some kind of badge of shame. EVs, specifically autonomous EVs should be targeted at the last mile, IMHO. I'm not trying to be contrary, I dislike musk because I think he's dishonest and a narcissist.

Because genius can only exist in physical sciences and mathematics. That's all I got from your post.

I hate this "capitalist-worship" for lack of a better term. He "single-handedly" did nothing, he merely supplied the capital and the coordination for a team of ~hundreds of thousands of people to build rockets and EVs.

This isn't an attack on your collectivist worldview, it's an objective observation. It's simply a matter of fact that if there was no Elon Musk, reusable rockets would have been delayed two decades at a bare minimum. The same goes for transforming EVs from clunky sideshows to "S3XY" vehicles. Hence, he single-handedly made these changes happen.

There is no way to say that with certainty. SpaceX is far from the only rocket company and while yes, they have had great success, their success only makes it harder for other rocket companies to stand out and succeed. What if another company was just a a year or two behind SpaceX but got their funding shit on when SpaceX launched their rocket?

SpaceX is standing on the shoulders of giants, if SpaceX didn't exist, the science and people wouldn't just disappear.

I don't think anyone is saying that without SpaceX science and people wouldn't exist.

But, SpaceX and Tesla for sure accelerated the EVs market and reusable rockets. I don't think anyone could've created this level of buzz around their companies. Main thing being that most of the general public now knows about Tesla and SpaceX and the awareness around EVs and reusable rockets. Now, I'm not saying Musk is some godsend or something, but he definitely played big role in creating this buzz around space travel and EVs.

> their success only makes it harder for other rocket companies to stand out and succeed.

Of course it does. That's one of the main points of one's success and it is true for every single field in existence. By that logic, no one should succeed because that would make it difficult for others? I strongly disagree with that one.

I disagree. Competition is good.

Tesla proved rich people buy rich people things.

SpaceX proved government budgets aren't scrutinized enough.

Not particularly shocking.

SpaceX is saving the US government heaps of money. Sure you could argue about spending on things in the first place. Assuming though we are talking about who to award to contracts to though they have saved heaps on just giving the extra work to ULA/ Boeing and other traditional aerospace companies. They have also created a competitor that will drive down prices on all space contracts.

I did argue exactly this, one hour before you commented. See my peer post down the thread.

What an idiotic thing to say. This is just pure 'I don't like this person so I'm gone shit on everything he does' syndrome.

Rich people buy rich people things, yes, and it matter if its a gas car or an electric. And it matter if the battery industry was transformed by that. And it matters that the image of electric cars was transformed. It matters that the largest fast charging network in the world was financed by this.

SpaceX proved that they could make things the government already does massively cheaper. Literally read any report from NASA or GAO. NASA own evaluation showed that the 300M SpaceX spend on the initial Falcon 9 would have cost 3 billion if done by the government.

Since SpaceX join the race military launches have come down in price by sometimes multiple 100 million $. ULA even outside of the 300M$+ launch prices, received an extra 900M every year.

Literally everything the government is buying from SpaceX could literally not be done cheaper by any other government, foreign or domestic or company foreign or domestic.

When SpaceX got started the commercial launch market was basically 0% US launchers, SpaceX alone changed that to depending on you calculate 50-90% of the commercial market now.

There is seriously not a single argument you can make about SpaceX other then simply arguing the government should be doing spaceflight at all. Everything we know about government internals suggest that both NASA and DoD are beyond happy with SpaceX.

> This is just pure 'I don't like this person so I'm gone shit on everything he does' syndrome.

That's odd, I didn't say a single word about whether or not I liked Elon. Did you mean to reply to my post or someone else's?

>NASA own evaluation showed that the 300M SpaceX spend on the initial Falcon 9 would have cost 3 billion if done by the government.

interesting, can you cite that?

This is the citation used by Wikipedia

https://www.nasa.gov/pdf/586023main_8-3-11_NAFCOM.pdf

3x more expensive (0.44B vs 1.2B) for NASA to do it. Slide #3 states NASA did not perform a detailed analysis of the estimates, but NASA concluded the number of employees, layers of management, and infrastructure were the key differences. And slide 6 almost sounds like NASA is saying "NASA shouldn't do this." Makes sense. They should use their budget and more comprehensiive oversight for zanier stuff, IMHO. Speaking of oversight, I also doubt SpaceX will be grilled anywhere near as severely as NASA when a death does occur, Elon has been upfront that this is risky stuff.

All of your points about government budget bloat only seem to support

>SpaceX proved government budgets aren't scrutinized enough.

I'm with you on everything except the Bitcoin bit. I think he knew exactly that (a) it's a highly speculative asset, and (b) he has enough rabid fans and general publicity to move the market in exactly the ways that he benefits from.

That makes it sound like he was doing a cheap pump and dump.

Maybe you're right.

Tesla still has 90% of the Bitcoin they bought.

If his proclamation knocks, say, half the value off Bitcoin, and it stays there, that wasn't a very clever pump and dump, because they kinda skipped the 'dump' part.

They only declare their sales after the fact. There is a chance that Tesla owns no bitcoin at this time. Probably they still do, but...

Then won't they get in trouble? The most recent statement directly says they have not sold any, just stopping accepting payments in it.

That would be an explicit lie then, something the SEC has jurisdiction over? (I'm not actually sure)

Is the SEC regulating bitcoin now? No. so they couldn't do a thing. Bitcoin isn't a security.

SEC doesn't regulate Bitcoin.

SEC does regulate stocks of companies like Tesla whose dealings in Bitcoin could affect said stock price.

That has never stopped Elon before! "funding secured"

I think the statement says they will not be selling any in the future.

Perhaps it's a chump and pump. Bring down the value to buy the dip.

I'll say again, it makes no sense for Elon Musk to do a cheap pump and dump. He's worth over $100 billion. The hundreds of millions he might make from a pump and dump are literally a rounding error to him

A pump and dump gets him actual cash, as opposed to capital tied up in shares. But more importantly, every move gets him the press coverage he craves.

This is really no different from any other "engineering visionary" executive, everywhere.

These types have a solid understanding of what's technically possible by the laws of physics, but wholly underestimate the feasibility of a complete implementation.

It's an open discussion whether these types are "bad" or "good". I tend to believe that hyper-optimists have a role in this world that drives progress forward. Teddy's Roosevelt's "Man in the arena", if you will.

> The dude thought covid would go away last May. > He's thought that full self driving was 6 months away for literally 4 years now.

He can't predict the future, so what?

>He thinks it's easier to make Mars habitable than it is to keep the Earth habitable.

He never said this.

> And he didn't really understand what Bitcoin was when he sank 1.5 billion into it.

How can you prove he doesn't understand what Bitcoin was?

> He can't predict the future, so what?

Literally everyone else with half a clue could predict that one correctly.

No comment on how smart or stupid Elon is (he is somehow effective), but I'm with you on all of those things except "He thinks it's easier to make Mars habitable than it is to keep the Earth habitable":

The concept of having humans on another planetary body makes a lot of sense as a backup-plan for humanity. The Drake equation be damned - in case we're actually alone, we have a pretty strong moral requirement to make sure that (human) life survives.

The point is that whatever you would need to make Mars habitable could _directly apply_ to keeping Earth habitable at orders of magnitude less difficulty.

Imagine trying to build up population centers at the bottom of the ocean in order to have a backup plan for some nuclear winter on the surface. You could just build your hermetically-sealed, closed-system things on the ground! They'd work just as well (absent, I guess, the getting nuked part). Mars is that, plus you gotta actually get over there to send resources for the first couple hundred years.

> The concept of having humans on another planetary body makes a lot of sense as backup-plan for humanity.

Sorry, but it's like planning your workout routine in a burning building.

The climate emergency is building right now, this instant. Cosmic threats like asteroids happen on the order of millions of years apart.

We need to stabilize the planet, now, in this generation, immediately, or we will doom a million species and most of humanity.

Once that is done, we can look at problems on the ten thousand to ten million year scales that cost quadrillions of dollars to solve, like "moving to a second planet".

Let me be blunt - unless we go all out, the collapse will happen a hundred years before any Mars colony is self-sufficient, and none of them will survive.

We can do both at the same time and we should.

"Global Warming" is about the Earth going ~2C to 4C out-of-whack with our traditional norms over the next century or so.

Mars is about being at -60C all the time, or roughly 80C away from what humans want. And temperature isn't even the worst part: Mars doesn't have enough oxygen for Humans to survive. Mars doesn't have enough nitrogen for plants to grow (and make oxygen). Mars doesn't have enough gravity to keep a dense enough atmosphere for us.

---------

Look, I recognize the difficulty that Global Warming has on the human race. But Global Warming is a far, far, far easier problem than trying to have a sustainable, livable experience on Mars.

There's 7 billion human brains on earth. We can spare a couple to focus on making our species multi-planetary while the rest deal with cleaning up the mess at home. It's unreasonable to expect the entire human race to stop what they're doing and focus on one issue.

There is no meaningful difference between surviving extreme conditions on mars and extreme conditions on earth.

The only difference is that the number of people that can live in extreme conditions is much smaller than the number that can live in normal conditions.

Fighting against climate change is purely about making sure that the earth can maintain 7 billion + humans. Any mars colonization program will not progress fast enough to let 7 billion humans inhabit mars within the next 200 years.

>It's unreasonable to expect the entire human race to stop what they're doing and focus on one issue.

Nobody said "stop what they're doing" except you. But the usual argument is that Elon Musk is accelerating the progress toward mars colonization and accelerating that progress simply isn't needed because of time constraints that no amount of money can solve. It will take decades no matter what a conman tells you.

Its unreasonable to expect any progress in transforming Mars to happen within our lifetime.

...and Rome wasn't built in a day, what's your point? Just because we won't see tangible results in our lifetime doesn't mean the effort, lessons learned and thought energy in that direction is meaningless.

Trying to live on Mars is meaningless. All effort put towards it is complete, and utter waste.

As I said in other comments, feel free to waste your resources on the project. But if you're trying to convince others that the project is useful or fruitful (and ask for other people's resources or help on the matter), then be prepared for some resistance.

In your nightmare scenario we're going to need terraforming tech for Earth.

If all of humanity lives on Earth though, we're just one unlucky meteorite away from going extinct.

Given this: let's develop the terraforming tech for Mars, and establish colonies there.

> In your nightmare scenario we're going to need terraforming tech both on Earth and Mars.

The hypothetical technology to reduce Earth's temperature by 4-degrees Celsius is simply going to be fundamentally different from the hypothetical technology to increase Mars's temperature by 80-degrees Celsius.

(Sorry, you caught my post while I was editing it in the first two minutes.)

I don't see why shouldn't try to do both:

a) Lower the earth's surface temperature

b) Begin the process of building a backup of humanity on Mars

Because B) is a waste of time, money, and effort.

Whether or not A) is true has nothing to do with whether or not B) is worth doing. There's no reason to imply that I'm making a false dichotomy fallacy.

I'm sorry, but short of instating a dictatorship you can't really stop people betting on things you don't like.

I'm not saying you're not allowed to work on it. If its a task you feel like wasting your money on, that's fine.

But don't expect me to support the effort by any means, not until you give me an argument for why Mars Terraforming would be a worthwhile use of resources I control or resources I have otherwise influence over.

It's a private enterprise, not the government

Nobody wants your support, they just need crazy enough wealthy people

Sure. But we're discussing Elon Musk here.

The fact that he's spending resources on nominally going to Mars is completely idiotic. I've got enough of a brain to figure that out.

Its a free country. Which means I'm free to make my opinion on how others spend their money and resources.

-----------

This is relevant because of all of the highly questionable moves Musk has done in the past weeks. He pumped BTC, pumped DOGE online. He pretends that he's a busy and (Aspergers) CEO despite spending huge amounts of effort on pop culture like Rick and Morty, Saturday Night Live, and other cultural mainstays. He proposes that terraforming Mars is a fruitful endevour.

He lies about "Full Self Driving" to the public for years, even as news reports come out as people literally die and burn to death inside of the cars his companies make. He claims COVID19 is a hoax, in an effort to keep his factories open.

He publishes a Finite-Element-Analysis of Hyperloop so basic that a 1st year college student could have done it. He builds tiny tunnels without any emergency contingencies while putting highly flammable lithium Ion batteries inside of those tunnels for Las Vegas.

And then finally, we come to this topic. Where he first hypes BTC (after buying it), and then after selling a huge chunk of it (over 10% in the past quarter), seemingly moves to dump the price of BTC.

Etc. etc.

At some point, we have to recognize that this guy is not an "engineer" at all. Musk is a hypeman at best. His lack of focus (so many topics covered...) suggests mania (as opposed to Aspergers). I dunno. Its getting harder and harder to take Musk seriously on any of these issues.

Nicely put. Just one point on the last paragraph, I guess somebody with Asperger's could also have ADHD. They can concentrate on something that catches their interest and forget about everything else for a while, but they can also shift their focus to whatever draws their attention next. In fact sustaining their effort over one long-term thing might be a skill they have to hone just like many other people. There doesn't seem to be a contradiction IMO.

> In fact sustaining their effort over one long-term thing might be a skill they have to hone just like many other people. There doesn't seem to be a contradiction IMO.

What is Elon Musk's "one long term thing" ?

* Payment Processors? (Paypal? X.com? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X.com)

* Electric Cars? (Tesla?)

* Solar Panels? Utility scale electric generators? (SolarCity?)

* Space? (SpaceX)

* Infrastructure? (Hyperloop? Boring Company?)

* AI? (Self-driving cars)

* Internet infrastructure? (Starlink?)

* BTC / DOGEcoin? Crypto-currencies?

For Payment Processors: we're looking at web technologies like Javascript, Two-factor authentication, Back-end Web processing, etc. etc. That's very much in the know for us nerds who hang around here in ycombinator: an extended "hyperfocus" on Payment Processors is a lifetime of effort alone.

There's simply not enough time for Elon Musk to reach "expert" levels of understanding in any of these subjects. Anyone who knows anything about these subjects knows that Musk's discussion points are EXTREMELY shallow. They're deep enough that maybe a layperson thinks that Musk is smart, but... seriously, look at his recent DOGEcoin / BTCcoin discussion points. The dude barely understand cryptocurrencies (or at least pretends he barely understands them, as he "suddenly" realizes the energy implications of BTC).

------------

I'm not really doubting the ability of someone with Asperger's to change subjects. But given how quickly Elon Musk changes subjects, its my personal opinion that he probably doesn't have Asperger's. Do remember: that all the while he's changing these subjects, Elon Musk is partying hard and participating in pop culture (Saturday Night Live, Rick and Morty, Twitter rants, etc. etc.).

His behavior does NOT match any Asperger's individual I've ever met. I know everyone's case is unique, but... that's a lot of "non-Asperger's" things going on (social partying, pop culture, appearances on TV, live talks, CEO position, "jack-of-all-trades" behavior instead of depth into particular subjects... etc. etc.)

I'm no expert in psychology. But this behavior is _mania_: common in say Bipolar individuals. Which is useful in its own niches of course (much like Asperger's is useful in engineering: mania typically causes an individual to visit many subjects... albeit shallowly but yeah, that's probably useful to a typical CEO moreso than hyperfocus actually)

A collapse of humanity won't happen from the earth warming a couple of degrees though.

Yeah, you're right. I reached a bit on that one.

He's also never said anything of the sort. He regularly admits that Mars is going to be an insanely tough place to live.

The point is that Mars is far less inhabitable than even the bleakest predictions for Earth.

It's not that he's dumb, he's just not as transparent or even ethical as people paint him out as.

Required reading for anyone who thinks otherwise:

https://elonmusk.today/

I think it is the opposite. He is very transparent - it is just people do not want to believe his goals are exactly what he says they are.

I have lost count the number of times in the past about something I have told people the truth, the 100% truth and they tried to skip over what I said because it did not match what they wanted to believe.

Worse, afterwards when events prove they were wrong they then try to make all sorts of excuses to support their original claims.

You can try and pick on Elon's fine details, but look at the stuff people said he could not push thru. If this was before 2010 the idea of the Tesla cars, Solar Tiles, Power-walls, Falcon Rockets, Dragon Capsules, Boring Tunnel and Neuralink all seem like fantasy - yet today they all exist.

Instead I see people send lots of time concentrating on things like Hyperloop not working out so far while trying not to mention the successes.

I think it's ok for him to change his mind after further consideration.

...and it would give me hope that we might get round steering wheels and individual non-touchscreen controls for critical driving functions.

"Cus he's not that bright."

I think you're confusing mental bandwidth with intelligence, likewise you seem to be putting him on a pedestal expecting him to have an amazing network of advisors on every conceivable topic.

No, he's human and his limited attention is split between Tesla, SpaceX, and arguably the other projects he has. Likewise these are complex organizations with a lot of moving parts and it's impossible to not delegate to other competent people, hopefully more competent than not, and then if bad decisions are made by say a Board of Directors and/or CFO then it's perfectly reasonable to reverse course - it's more reasonable than expecting Elon to be an expert of everything, he's not super human.

However I imagine the situation's more complex than meets the eye, some people like you are sticking to cherrypicked facts, others are putting forward conspiracy theories founded on no evidence that this was Elon pumping and dumping purposefully, or that he's just doing it to piss off the SEC because he hates the SEC. Who knows.

Elon in the not so distant past tweeted: "Bitcoin is almost as much bs as fiat money" - so he certainly has enough of an idea to make that statement.

>He thinks it's easier to make Mars habitable than it is to keep the Earth habitable.

It probably is easier to survive long term on Mars than Earth because Mars has a very thin atmosphere. Earth could pull a Venus. Earth life on Mars requires underground small sealed compartments with radiation shielding which is a more survivable architecture than one big shared ecosystem.

Your definition of "long term" is stretching it a bit. If Earth "pulls a venus" it will be 100+ million years from now due to the expansion of the sun.

I thought the surface Venus was incredibly hot and uninhabitable mainly to the thick greenhouse gases in it's atmosphere. Why does the sun need to expand for that to happen on Earth?

That's not the answer but it's close. The correct answer is that "geniuses" can be dumb. Intelligence doesn't make one invulnerable to bad ideas, cons, indoctrination, herd behavior, logical fallacies, addictions, delusions, or anything else.

Related is the fact that billionaires and millionaires are just humans with lots of money. People seem to think a lot of money makes people somehow superhuman, or vice versa. It doesn't. Billionaires are subject to all the same fallacies and errors as anyone else. There is no superhuman enlightened "illuminati" that is somehow above and beyond the rest of us, at least cognitively. They might have a little bit more information but they are no more rational than we are.

Based on the COVID denial, cryptocurrency stuff, and memes if I didn't know better I'd say he's been hanging around on the 'chans... and I don't know better.

I think what you want to say is that he doesn't have a crystal ball instead of him not being that bright. How can anyone predict any of the above before hand? Bitcoin remains probably one of the few perplexing behaviors from Musk.

I admire you for calling Musk out on this platform. He's a quandary for sure...I've not worked him out. He's done too many amazing things to be an idiot - but yeah, he's done some super dumb shit too.

Most of those things sound like techno-optimism, which isn't really the same as being dumb.

COVID could've started to go away in May with HCT / massively more aggressive vax.

COVID could have started to go away in May 2020 with extremely aggressive lockdown and quarantine measures. In fact, where I live, it did - we reached 0 active cases for the first time almost exactly a year ago today, and have only had any cases in the community for a grand total of about two weeks since.

Musk opposed those measures though, which makes his level of expertise on the matter somewhat more dubious.

Vaccinations weren't an option last May, which is when Musk was saying Covid would be gone by, not this May.

Vaccinations could've been an option last May. The mRNA vaccines were designed days after receiving a full genetic sequence of the virus (in January). Those are the same two vaccines we are currently injecting people with – we just spent a long time on trials/approval/ramping up production. Far longer than necessary.

Previous attempts at mRNA vaccines had failed, due to the side effects being too serious. There was no reason to believe in May 2020 that a COVID mRNA vaccine would be any different than all the previous mRNA failures.

Can I have sources to that claim? I would like to use it.

https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/04/15/co... is a post from April of last year detailing the different types of vaccines, which does mention some of the issues mRNA vaccines have had in the past. I think there's a fuller discussion of mRNA somewhere on that blog, but the gist of it is "we've been trying this for about a decade and we might finally have all the kinks worked out."

Thank you, will give it a read.

My statement wasn't quite accurate. It was previous attempts at mRNA treatments that failed due to too many bad effects from the delivery mechanism.

Some companies gave up on mRNA then. Those that wanted to continue switched to trying to develop mRNA vaccines instead of mRNA treatments for non-viral conditions. Vaccines would require lower doses, which they hoped would reduce the problems with side effects.

Experimental mRNA vaccines were developed for a few viral diseases, but not had gotten through trials and been licensed for use in humans.

Some links to sources are in the history section of the Wikipedia article on RNA vaccines: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RNA_vaccine#History

Or he is really good at PR and know that he can raise money off of that and delegate the rest. And therefore smart.

There's a really big difference between what public figures say and what they believe.

When you have the power to influence policy/markets/opportunities simply by saying the right or wrong thing, that starts to factor into public statements a lot more than what you actually believe.

Your first two points are basically political positions. I know it's fun to imagine that the other political side is less intelligent, but don't take that impulse too seriously.

> He's thought that full self driving was 6 months away for literally 4 years now.

He might be completely aware that it's not plausible while still publicly saying otherwise for financial gain.

In which case he’s guilty of securities fraud, and is going to have a very bad time.

That's a maybe. Even if he really is guilty he might not have a bad time. The world is not just and there's very little justice in the judicial system.

He called a guy a pedophile with absolutely no evidence and paid no price for that.

When your profits depend on not understanding something chances are you won't understand it :)

>he didn't really understand what Bitcoin was

He's not dumb for a scum that scam billions in profit

Or it's that + some skin of the teeth grifting.

I'm no fan but 1) any moron on the web know about energy consumption of Blockchains 2) musk cannot be more stupid than them. He's (sadly) trolling the system imo