But "useful humanoid robot" is way more forward-looking than anything else he's done this with; the closest thing would be the whole "full self-driving without LIDAR" thing, which keeps getting pushed back and is likely not possible with current technology. And building a humanoid robot that can actually do stuff is probably an order of magnitude more difficult than that.
If I had to make a bet on when it was possible, I'd say 25 years. Maybe 10 if Tesla goes all-in on robots and spends tens of billions on it, Manhattan project style.
I have a decade of experience in robotics (including both humanoid robots and self-driving cars) and I think this is optimistic.
Robotics is a wonderful field if you like to work on hard research problems. It is a terrible field if you're trying to invent a profitable product.
What tesla are conceptually pitching here (let's ignore that they'll deliver something that's pretty useless by comparison to what they're hoping you're assuming they mean) is a not-in-our-lifetimes leap in robotics in multiple ways
The huge task is anyway not to build a robot. The huge part is to make the robot (or any device) smarter than a slice bread.
Your contention is that its power consumption that makes a general purpose humanoid robot impossible?
He probably doesn’t even do it to bump the stock price. It’s probably just about doing whatever will impress Grimes for a little while. Then they both smoke so much weed they forget the previous never-gonna-happen idea and come up with a brand new one.
> Remember the Cybertruck?
Cybertruck is literally not vapoware. It was never even supposed to come out before the end of this year. Technically they are not even late yet. Now they have pushed it back into 2022 but that is a few month delay is really not a that big a deal for a truck product with a new architecture based on a new factory.
The way you talk is as if the Cybertruck was supposed to be out last year and was delayed to 2025.
Literally every indication is that this will be a very successful product for Tesla. It being a few month, or half a year late is really not that big deal for a engineering and manufacturing project of that scale.
> Or how he said he could control pigs by putting microchips in their brains?
That was never what they actually said. Why the need to just make up stuff? And again, the never claimed this was a product anybody can just go out and buy within a year or so.
Neurolink the company is still working on that and literally nobody expected them to have a product yet.
Why do you feel the need to shit on the engineers that work on this just because you have some issue with Musk? The companies first goal is to make a product the help people with different deceases and disabilities. Do you get equally dismissive of all medical companies that don't have a product in the market after a few years of fundamental research?
So just because you have made up a wild story about Neurolink being about controlling sheep and you don't remember seeing a video of a remote controlled sheep on twitter you conclude that it is all bullshit.
> It’s probably just about doing whatever will impress Grimes for a little while.
This sort of psychoanalysis is literally the lowest form of comment you can find on Hacker News. You should be ashamed of yourself.
> Then they both smoke so much weed they forget the previous never-gonna-happen idea and come up with a brand new one.
Yeah because a Musk company has never actually done what they said they would. Literally all Musk does is make up stuff and that is why his companies constantly fail and never produce any product.
No matter SpaceX will launch 50-80% of total payload to Orbit this year. No matter that SpaceX produced the best rocket engine in human history. No matter SpaceX is universally accepted as the globally dominate space company. They control more satellites then all other government and companies combined.
No matter that Tesla is universally acknowledged as the global leader in BEV, auto-selling the second best most prolific BEV company by 2x and volume and far more then that in revenue. No matter they produced the fastest production car in human history. No matter that they literally designed a new battery and battery factory from the ground up.
No matter that both company are growing widely fast and Tesla being very profitable. SpaceX was very profitable but huge investment in Starship and Starlink likely make it unprofitable right now, but the unit economics are still great on their core business.
But of course, these are clear signs that all he does is sit around and get high and comes up with ideas to impress his girlfriend. Honestly, I can not even imagine what level of dislike or jealousy somebody must have to be so dismissive of somebody else.
If you want to call him a social inept asshole that is fine, but your argument simply doesn't hold water.
You missed the opportunity to say "globally accepted as the universally dominate space company"
And I notice you gave me a 6,000-word rant in response to my post, yet you dropped that whole Bitcoin thing as if I hadn't even said it.
Specially a person with the history of having the exact follow-through you criticize him for. Have you literally not been around for the last 2 decades?
Funny that this person that you have diagnosed drug addiction is widely more successful then you are.
I think flipping a giant rocket on its way back down to have it land upright sounded just as nutty as this awhile back, let alone a startup competing (successfully) against the military industrial complex.
The entire car industry is also adopting electric. No, I think Musk has enough notable wins to get a pass here.
It seems as though a lot of people (not the GP) really want to be apart of the narrative change on Musk, whatever humanity’s obsession is with building up and then destroying someone, followed with the redemption story.
He really doesn’t have to prove anything anymore in my book.
Flipping that rocket and getting NASA contracts to go actually do it against Boeing/Lockheed/etc is not a toy problem.
I don’t want to say it would never have happened without Spacex, but probably it would not have happened in our lifetime.
Human-level robotics, on the other hand, is not a problem of missing incentive. For all I know about the field (as a casual observer), we are still several breakthroughs away from achieving this goal.
We have actuators, sensors, and computers to build humanoid robots, isn’t it “just” a software problem like flipping rockets was?
There's a difference between not being able to do something, and not having a reason to.
Enough.
And herein lies the problem: landing the rocket is really cool, but normal people overestimate the difficulty. Because of this feat, "Elon can do anything!"
The reason we don't land rockets is half technical, half economic.
The list of things Elon has said they will achieve, and have not, far exceeds the list of exceptional tech his companies have produced.
Are people angry that Musk said he will have a prototype in a 18 month? Are they angry because he dared even mention wanting to work on that problem.
> landing the rocket is really cool, but normal people overestimate the difficulty.
Building the biggest rocket in the world, building new engines that are better then any invented in human history, coming up with a complete new way of reentering and doing a never before done landing maneuver and doing that from a space port that was basically a swamp only 1.5 years earlier is quite different then 'landing a rocket'.
Of course it doesn't mean he can magically do anything but his companies have enough engineering credit between them that when they announce to put serious resources behind something we should at least not dismiss them out of hand.
The have fully vertically integrated AI, power electronics, manufacturing robots and batteries both design, testing&validation and manufacturing facilities. Not to mention lots of capital and a CEO who clearly is supportive of the project if its gone make short term money or not.
I for one am interested to see where this is in 2-3 years.
> The list of things Elon has said they will achieve, and have not, far exceeds the list of exceptional tech his companies have produced.
Questionable. If you give an product announcement a 3-4 year lead time for development and commercialization. When you go back over the existence Musk companies, I would suggest that most has actually happened.
Sure they didn't do Red Dragon, propulsive Dragon landing, Roadster and Semi is not out yet FSD clearly didn't go as he hopped. I guess we could come up with some other abandoned and delayed projects. I guess they just delayed Cybertruck for a few more month but that is hardly noteworthy in the automotive industry.
The Starship projects is still remarkably close to the timeline from 2016 (that was considered beyond delusional by industry experts), Raptor and Vacuum Raptor outperform what was announced, Starlink are regularly launching and they are mass producing phase array antennas. Falcon 9 platform reached the 10 relights that was the initial target. The have managed to deliver humans to Station and bring them back (years before the competitor who will get 2 extra billion will be able to).
Tesla despite people clowning Musk about how dumb he is about manufacturing has scaled manufacturing as fast as almost no other manufacturing company ever has and there is no end in sight (new factories coming online as soon as this end of this year). Not to mention that they have achieved industry leading unit margins on that production. They are by far the largest produces of BEVs in the world by volume and by a even larger amount by revenue. They are producing Plaid power train cars and have made the fastest production car in history.
They are in the final stretch of having completed a re-design and re-engineering of a battery manufacturing line and battery. They did this almost fully vertically integrated building much of their own manufacturing equipment. This project alone is a gigantic engineering effort of a scale that is hard to really grasp. The end of this year is very likely when the first actual cars with these batteries will be sold.
I think FSD is by far their most visible and most relevant failure and by far the most talked about on HN, but overall I think its hard to point to any companies that did better in terms of technology development last decade (specially considering that when the decade started these companies were tiny).
Other aspirational goals he has set include a colony of a million people on Mars and a neural lace. I think a humanoid robot is less ambitious than either of these two.
On the other hand we just do not have the technology for a full humanoid robot, neither now nor the near future. An AI that can do mundane tasks like ironing and folding clothes is way beyond our grasp, and then there are the issue of limbs and power too.
Not for live humans we don't. The record for landing on Mars is around 1 ton for >$1B, this is too little for a crew cabin and ignores the life support requirement for months spend in space.
IDK, man, life support systems for such a long trip are much more demanding than for a jaunt to Moon and back.
Except Musk says they'll be in beta in 2022. Hah.
Crappy beta can be done quickly and can lead to other things.
However I have to agree with the person you are replying to. There has been the sort of myth going around that making rockets is hard. It used to be hard... 50 years ago. That is literally the technology Musk has been using for the last 20 years: 50 year old technology (and yes that includes reusability). He has just been doing it cheaper, which there was no incentive for anyone to do before because it wasn't a free market.
The reusable stuff is still misunderstood by most people too. Musk is losing money because of the reusability of his rockets. If he had never pursued reusability he would have made far, far more money from his launch business. Only now, after 10 years, are his reusable rockets just starting to break even with the cost of an expendable rocket (after reuse not before). He is pursuing reusability because it is his passion project, not because there is any money to be made from it.
Since Musk, another 4 private companies have reached orbit, or will reach orbit this year (Firefly, Rocket Lab, Relativity Space, and Virgin Orbit). All of them took almost exactly 6 years from founding to orbit, just like Musk did.
Furthermore, if you have been following closely, you would have seen the huge and humiliating mess ups he had with Tesla where he literally flushed billions and billions of dollars down the toilet. Any COO from another company would have had no problems setting up these manufacturing facilities without trouble, but Musk though he was smarter than everyone else and proved it was the other way around when it came to a competitive business like auto manufacturing.
The man has vision, but this whole AI thing is just Musk getting lost in his own marketing.
For something that used to be hard, the very well-funded companies in that area besides SpaceX seem to be having a hell of a time achieving anything even remotely near comparable performance.
I have been following it closely since 2012. Not sure where he flushed the money down the toilet? And with that he still grew the company well. Without Elon Tesla would never have become the 666B company that is today.
> Since Musk, another 4 private companies have reached orbit, or will reach orbit this year (Firefly, Rocket Lab, Relativity Space, and Virgin Orbit)
Rocket Lab was founded in 2006 and reached orbit in 2018 (and failed in 2020)?
Virgin Orbit's vehicle LauncherOne was started in 2007 (under Virgin Galactic) began operations in 2021.
And we'll see how Firefly and Relativity Space succeeds with their launches.
You have been following for that long and don't know the company continues to burn cash? That they said they'd never raise money again, and then raised money about 6 times? That if it wasn't for subsidies and funky accounting there is no profit?
When it comes to raising cash, things change, I remember once cash raise happened immediately after their value had increased much in a short interval, so it made sense to raise. And looking back, with the company being worth 666B now, they've done a lot of right calls, but of course some wrong ones as well.
And it's a myth that Tesla doesn't do any profit. For example last quarter Tesla got around 354M in regulatory credits (this is what the anti-tesla crowd likes to point out) but the net income was 1.14B. And besides the regulatory credit should be counted, not like the oil industry hasn't had it's insane amount of subsides over the years.
It totally makes sense, I agree. Just seems odd to say we won't, and then do, repeatedly.
>And it's a myth that Tesla doesn't do any profit. For example last quarter Tesla got around 354M in regulatory credits (this is what the anti-tesla crowd likes to point out) but the net income was 1.14B.
It's only a myth if you don't actually examine the underlying accounting. Regulatory credits, realizing deferred revenue on FSD (which doesn't exist), expanding the accounts payable, cutting R&D, bitcoin speculation...
All of these things affect the income statement in a way that pumps income that may or may not even be sustainable. All so people will say "look, profits!"
Are they marginally profitable now? Maybe, but that's nothing to brag about at a market cap of over half a trillion dollars.
>not like the oil industry hasn't had it's insane amount of subsides over the years.
So, what's your point here? Did I say oil companies deserve subsidies? Am I looking at the financials of Exxon? Being as how Tesla vehicles have tires, plastics, a supply chain...they also benefit from oil subsidies. What does this have to do with anything?
Decent to do more than a billion in profit and they are a growth company with Giga Austin and Giga Berlin opening soon. When amazon had a similar market cap they did around 800m in profit. It's ofcourse easy in retrospect to say that amazon was a winner, but of course it was an unknown to investors and everyone placed their bets back then.
And my point with subsidies is that they affect the outcome, as they exist they have an effect on the business, and should be valued as such.
I think this is where you go astray. Reusable rockets aren't old technology. In fact, they were considered so impractical and complicated that none of the big players even tried to develop one.
In fact, even after SpaceX landed their first boosters succesfully, participants of a panel discussion organized by at an American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics Forum on Propulsion rejected the idea as being market-unjustified:
https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/07/expendable-rocket-bu...
> If he had never pursued reusability he would have made far, far more money from his launch business.
Strikes me as short term thinking and not true, also. The plan is to sell tickets at $400,000 each to get to Mars. There doesn't seem to be any way to achieve that without reusability. The money to be made from founding the first Mars colony supplied with reusable rockets completely dwarfs some random launch provider on Earth.
SpaceX never was and never will be a simple launch provider. If that is your lens then you are missing the company goals of 1M people living on Mars.
> The plan is to sell tickets at $400,000 each to get to Mars.
His Starship is set to hold 40 people on the trip to mars. That would mean he earns 16 million per Starship sent to mars. Each Starship takes about 8 launches to fully fuel.
He currently sells 1 regular launch for 50 million each, so your numbers just don't add up. This isn't a money making scheme.
In fact, Musk would be the first person to admit he isn't trying to make money by sending people to Mars. This is his passion project. In fact, the whole reason he created his Starlink business was to pay for his efforts to colonize Mars.
What? Here is "Musk himself" saying in a tweet that Falcon 9 only needs to be reusable 3 times to make sense economically.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1295883862380294144?s=20
It makes no sense for them because they can't offer a low enough price and otherwise create payloads in order to achieve a flight rate.
ULA simply only has one costumer, the US military and very occasionally NASA. They have never really competition in the private market or ever tried to generate their own payloads to increase flight rate.
Arianespace is a incredibly bureaucratic organization where everything has to go threw a political process. It cost them 4 billion to create a pretty average quality large rocket and doing re-usability for them would take 1-2 decades and another 10 billion.
The idea that it is not profitable or more generally wroth it for SpaceX is crazy. SpaceX has mentioned many times that even only using the rockets 2 times already makes sense for them. They are getting 10 reuses out of the Block 5 rockets. The idea that it was not worth the investment is frankly speaking laughable.
Without re-usability things like Starlink would simply not be possible in the first place.
> He currently sells 1 regular launch for 50 million each, so your numbers just don't add up. This isn't a money making scheme.
While I agree that Mars travel is not a money making scheme, those 50 million includes a huge margin and another huge cost for the second stage.
If you assume almost no margin and you assume a equally reusable upper stage, far less operational cost, no fairing recovery cost, less refurbishment cost and so on you can get the number way lower then the current Falcon 9 price. Depending on flight rate cost in the low millions are approachable for LEO launches.
There are other opportunities, dedicate tanker Starship should reduce the number refueling required. Next generation Raptor 2 versions and new ally for the Starship should eventually make it possible deliver a 250 tons reusable. Meaning you can potentially do 4 refueling flights, not 8.
The pure business case for Mars colony still doesn't add up but low enough to make a Mars bases together with NASA totally feasible.
Spacex can launch more rockets per year because they don't need to keep building a first stage. That's how they could launch almost 2k Starlink satellites already. If you look at the statistics, most of the launches for 2020 and 2021 have been on reused boosters.
What is this in reference to?
Legacy manufacturers have far more automated systems building far more complicated cars. What was "pushed to the limit"?
Gwynne is an excellent manager and I don't want to say anything bad about her and SpaceX is lucky to have her but the idea that she is 'main driver' is just idiotic. It is counter to everything you read about SpaceX. It is counter to all the experience reports from people within or from outside of SpaceX.
Neither Gwynne nor any of the other original leaders, Mueller or Königsmann seem to agree with the assessment.
This trope seems to mostly come from an time where Tesla was not doing so well in 2017 and everybody that didn't like Elon was saying 'see Tesla is going to the shitter, he doesn't have Gwynne that is the reason SpaceX is successful'.
Tesla of course now is incredibly successful without having a Gwynne and that somehow is just lucky or something.
For a while people also used to say that JB was why Tesla was technically successful, he was the mastermind behind all the engineering at Tesla and without him would fail to innovate.
Gwynne could leave SpaceX tomorrow and SpaceX would continue to do very well. The head of HR for example has been with the company since Falcon 1 days and could take that job and do a good job as well. Elon could likely do much of it himself but it would talk away time he would much rather spend with the engineering team.
A substantial portion of the Musk fanbase believe he's the one personally designing rockets and coding the software to land them.
I think he does actively involve himself in engineering-level discussions and decision-making, both at SpaceX and Tesla. Most CEOs don't do that, but some do – Bill Gates did that a lot when CEO of Microsoft – so it is not unprecedented. Designing something as complex as a car or a launch vehicle (or an operating system or an office suite) is a team effort, it is never going to be all on a single individual, and senior people are inevitably going to delegate a lot of the detailed analysis and design work to their subordinates – but a senior executive who actively involves themselves in engineering decisions can have a real impact on the outcome, for better or worse. He isn't formally trained as an engineer, but he has a degree in physics, and he is obviously a reasonably intelligent and very dedicated guy who has had years of access to some very experienced engineers, so the idea that he has learnt enough aerospace/automotive engineering to actually make a useful contribution as an engineering decision-maker isn't unbelievable.
I'm a bit of a SpaceX fan myself, but I feel like there is a big disconnect between what the average SpaceX fan actually believes about SpaceX, and the caricatures that many SpaceX/Musk critics like to paint. (Of course, there may be the occasional SpaceX fan who takes it way too far, and for whom these caricatures actually become true, but I don't think the vast majority of us are actually like that.)
Adopted child, if so.
It also let's you point to two (major) successes while dismissing the Boring Company, Nuerolink, SolarCity and the Hyperloop, among others that went nowhere. Not that his sucess rate is anything to be embarrassed by, but his announcement alone doesn't lead to me expecting anything to ever be commercially available.
SolarCity was not Musk lead company, he was just an investor. SolarCity was acquired and is part of Tesla and while they had to remove resources from Solar during the manufacturing difficulty and scaling difficulty the solar and home energy part of their business is still growing very well.
I think its fair to say that going into solar was not as successful as Tesla hoped, but neither is it a failure. In the last year the growth of the business line has been finally showing promising growth.
They are starting to work with more outside contractors and they have the cheapest solar product on the market.
> Nuerolink
The company still exists, they are working very hard on a very difficult problem. They are still adding people. They are working on something incredibly hard, has never been done before and will require a lengthy regulatory approval process.
They did not announce a timeline for a product that they failed to hit.
What exactly is your issue with the company?
> Boring Company
They are growing, have an engineering team working on the technology. Their commercial bids are very competitive. They have established test sights in California and Texas. They have made quite a few improvements already and in the publicly available data their commercial bids seem to be competitive.
Apparently its a failure because the first product they ever did didn't meet the your standards or something. The costumer of that product seems to be happy and wants to extend the project. But who cares about happy costumers, what matters if how much people on HN like it.
So how exactly is this a failure? I would be my ass that Boring Company valuation now is significantly higher then when it started. And I bet its already more successful then most startups.
If that is your definition of 'going nowhere' I wish my projects would turn into companies of that size.
> Hyperloop
Maybe go back and actually read what was said at the time. Musk literally said he wasn't gone work on it. So your critic is that project he never said he was gone do didn't get done?
That makes no sense. He literally said 'I posting this paper, maybe somebody wants to work on it, I have no time to do it'.
If these are considered 'failures' now I really have done nothing in my life. I mean I haven't even created a single 100M+ company yet. Seems to me the only one that actually didn't go anywhere is the one that he said he wasn't going to do.
How do you feel about Blue Origin, which Bezos regularly infused billions into before it finally got to its first flight?
The Hyperloop, is something Musk spent over a calendar year and numerous engineering assets working on before he decided to give up and open-source their work. If any of his projects was an unreserved failure, it was the hyperloop.
I don't get why you're so upset about this. I didn't say Musk was horrible. I just pointed out a lot of his projects tend to fail. I explicitly said that his success rate is good. I just also pointed out he has enough misfires that there's no reason to believe his announcements at this stage are going to see commercial availability.
Can you provide me with a source on that? During that time he was full time for Tesla and SpaceX and they were very busy during that time with other projects. So I can't see how this much engineering was put into it.
Also, not doing a project is not the same as failing at doing something.
The result of the investigation was clearly, I think its a good idea but I have no time to do it. Maybe somebody else will.
I think he still hopes to eventually put a Hyperloop type system into a boring tunnel, but he thinks shorter range solution are more important and tunneling technology needs to improve to make it viable.
> SolarCity
I agree it could have been a failure, but also don't know that for sure.
> I don't get why you're so upset about this. I didn't say Musk was horrible. I just pointed out a lot of his projects tend to fail.
I am not upset, I just pointed out for the most part his projects do not fail. You pointed to one project they didn't actually do more then a initial technical evaluation on. And on project that could have failed, but actually didn't.
I think objectively if any person said 'I'm gone do X project' (that was considered incredibly difficult), I can't think of many that would have more credibility then Musk (ie Tesla, SpaceX or a new company).
A humanoid robot is a risky project for sure and it does not seem to be the same level of importance as batteries or reusable rockets, so maybe they will abandoned it at some point.
Of course, a lot of that money is all virtual, in owned stocks and market value.
I think he's really got figured it out tbh - as long as he expects the technology to exist at some point, the fact that he's parked a big chunk of cash in the idea gives him an advantage. It's like he's reserved a spot for his company to exist when the tech exists. His team doesn't necessarily have to be the one actually making breakthrough innovations in order to be in a good position to reap the advantages of said innovations.