Yeah, I don't think it's possible with the current hardware. The best Tesla can hope for is Level 3, mainly due to the lack of redundancy.

That could have literally been the command from above - "I want over a million robo-taxis on the road" - and then that trickles down into the company.

Musk is a fraudster who has consistently lied to investors and the public about timelines and features - FSD, SolarWinds solar tiles, the robotaxis, "founding" Tesla, "founding" PayPal, the Vegas "loop", cheaper tunnels, hyperloop, NeuraLink brain-computer videogames, flying cars, the cave submarine, turbines on cars, "more efficient" batteries and on and on and on. There are a few lies that have not yet been proven lies - the 40k satellites or the Mars settlement or the $2M rocket, for example - but I have faith that they will also prove to be lies in time.

His only contributions have been early investment in Tesla and hiring the right people for SpaceX to achieve some decent cost savings and vertical landing on Earth. It's definitely not nothing, but it really shouldn't make anyone believe 99% of what he says, or consider him some kind of genius.

He tends to share his ideas publicly before they are "verified with reality", which leads to a lot of them being late, over-promised under-delivered, etc.

But if you take his statements as "thinking aloud", I much prefer this mode of operation. On the other end of the spectrum is Apple, with zero "thinking aloud" or sharing _anything_ until it's ready to ship. It's ok... but much less fun.

These are not random ideas that he throws around, these are all examples of products he has held massive press conferences for, announcing them with fanfare, and referencing them again and again in public speeches. He really does seem to believe in some of them, even some that they are quite obviously impossible - casting serious doubts on his intelligence or understanding of science (which is not surprising, given he only has an undergraduate degree in Physics as science credentials).

>It's ok...

>thinking aloud

He's a CEO and is legally bound to not lie or mislead the investors though. For example Skreli is in part serving a federal sentence for lying to the investors who didn't lose any money.

Skrelli raising the price of that medication was legal. (I know you know that.)

We still have no laws preventing another greedy person doing the same.

They went after him for PR purposes.

Personally, I wish they left him alone, and instead changed drug law that will prevent these huge price hikes in the future.

In a weird way, lonely Hoody Boy exposed a huge flaw in the system, and we should be thanking him?

"One million robotaxis in 15 months" is not thinking aloud, it's a very concrete prognosis.

What I mean to say is that you should take what he's saying as "talking aloud" and not as any concrete prognosis, even if he makes it sound that way. Then it's fun.

This is a very naive take. There are several examples of him being intentionally dishonest, e.g. the funding secured thing. He's a sociopathic narcissist.

Starship seems really promising, though, making amazing progress in record time. I'm really optimistic about SpaceX, that whole company seems to be aligned toward one goal only, getting people on mars, if I had any expertise in that area I would sign up in a second.

Mars is a fools' goal, only really interesting as a point of pride. There will very obviously not be any kind of Mars "colony" in our lifetimes, and there are good reasons to believe that none will ever exist - there are too little resources on Mars, and too harsh conditions, for it to make any kind of sense.

Apart from that, there are chances that Spaceship will be a good product, probably making it cheaper to put stuff in orbit than it is today. On the other hand, this may wildly accelerate problems with space junk, especially if the irresponsible plans for putting more than twice the amount of objects in LEO are allowed to go through.

> There will very obviously not be any kind of Mars "colony" in our lifetimes

Define "Mars colony". A thriving metropolis with millions of residents? Or a permanently crewed research station with a few dozen staff? The former is not going to happen in our lifetimes. The later isn't certain but I think it has some chance of happening. But Musk is going to try to set up the later and call it a "Mars colony", with the declared ambition of eventually developing it into the former. Aspirational naming.

> there are too little resources on Mars, and too harsh conditions, for it to make any kind of sense.

In 2021, Musk has a net worth of $170 billion. He's only 50, he could easily live for another 30 or 40 years. It is entirely plausible that by the time he dies, he will be a multi-trillionaire. To whom, or to what, is he going to leave his trillions? (Heck, forty years from now, quadrillionaires could even be a thing, and old man Musk could be one of them.) He might leave them to a charitable foundation dedicated to paying for the colonisation of Mars. If that happens – well, even if you are right that colonising Mars is pointless, if a multi-trillion, or even multi-quadrillion, dollar foundation is willing to pay for it, it may actually happen, no matter how pointless it may be.

Another possible scenario: sometime in the next few decades, the US successfully lands on Mars, and sets up a modestly sized US-led international research base. The US government continues its policy of excluding China, so China responds by landing on Mars independently and establishing their own competing Mars base. China and the US then become trapped in a new space race, in which each seeks to outdo the other with the size and capabilities of their respective Mars bases, not motivated by any practical economic or military benefits, but simply by national pride and prestige. A US-led Mars base could grow into thousands of people, and US Congress might become politically locked into paying for them out of the federal budget, even if their existence doesn't actually benefit the average US citizen in any tangible way.

(The above two scenarios are not mutually exclusive, it is possible both might happen at the same time.)

You seem so sure of yourself.

I'm not sure of myself, I'm quite sure of our collective inability to do anything as complex (and expensive and wasteful of resources) as a Mars colony. Of course, time will tell.

First "starship" launch will end with Big Bada Boom and will end SpaceX.

So there's already been 10 or more of them that exploded, no? You mean the first crewed launch? That'll probably the 100th actual launch, with the tens of failures in the beginning and a streak of successes that's convincing enough to put people on. Had the same problem with Falcon as well, but we've already forgotten. All the initial rockets exploded, but now we've just gotten used to them landing perfectly.

Starship as defined on spacex.com: SpaceX’s Starship spacecraft and Super Heavy rocket (collectively referred to as Starship). So far there were no flights with both SN and SH as one ship.

From what I've seen they think its like a 50/50 chance of the first starship blowing up, but they are already building the next couple ones, so they are ready for that. They are not just building one rocket, they are building a rocket assembly line and it seems like they have cracked the code on that. Not a chance one explosion will end spaceX, I'm not sure how you could seriously think that if you have been following the development.

Starship explosion could damage/destroy large part of the "starbase" and cause significant damage in Bocca Chica. It will also have terrible impact on the wildlife refuge that's there. In addition to that Musk's Starlink satellite will cause Kessler Syndrome. Both of these events could not only finish Spacex but will affect space exploration for decades.

"It's not a lie if you believe it." - George Costanza

I'm assuming your Twitter feed has become full of information supporting the idea the Elon is a fraud. You are falling into the same feedback loop that people who think Trump really won and the people who think that White people should apologize for existing.

You need to create new social media accounts and try to look for information supporting the opposite idea. I'm not suggesting that Elon is totally honest about everything he says, but there is more to him than what you seem to have heard.

I'm saying this to help you, because, you have been misinformed by these feedback loop algorithms. If you keep your identity tied to this idea that Elon is a total fraud you are going to become more and more upset overtime as the evidence to the contrary accumulates.

Thank you for your concern, but I have read plenty about his successes or failures to make up my mind. Much of this has been by virtue of listening to him directly, and looking at the ways he intentionally manipulates opinion of himself.

OK, well best of luck.

I thought shorter astroturfing was a 2020 thing