> Building things people want gives credibility.

nope, it generates hype. That's all there is.

Up until very very recently they were losing money on every car they made and only a pandemic killing enough factory workers worldwide to create shortages have they managed to break even. What Tesla made money on is regulatory credits.

A year ago

https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a36266673/teslas-q1-2021-e...

> The company had an income of $438 million, including a $101 million "positive impact" from the sale of Bitcoin, and $518 million from selling zero-emission regulatory credits to other automakers. That means Tesla continues to lose money making and selling vehicles.

The Boring Tunnel Company barely have built anything and what they did build is a deathtrap.

Hyperloop is completely impossible.

SpaceX's Starlink satellites are involved in about 1,600 close encounters between two spacecraft every week, ~50 % of all such.

Also, Elon Musk already committed a federal felony as a twitter user and it is beyond bizarre he is a) not in jail b) allowed to bid on it.

>Up until very very recently they were losing money on every car they made

For others in the crowd, this phrase is extremely useful for spotting a short seller (or someone who was primarily influenced by the short-n-distort crowd from 2016-2019).

This statement is a lie, and was never true. Every car Tesla made was produced and sold at a profit. Their high margins fed crazy growth. You can only get to these bullshit statements by counting their reinvestment into factories as "loss".

For example:

-Make car for $40k

-Sell for $50k

-$10k/per car profit

-Make $xM in profit from cars for that quarter

-Raise $1B to grow based on the above

-Spend some of that $1B on factories, such that the total spent of that $1B is more than $xM

-Short n Distort campaigners argue that because you spent more than you made, you are "losing money on every car".

I never ever trade individual stocks , that's not for ADHD people. My savings rest in unmanaged index funds.

>Also, Elon Musk already committed a federal felony as a twitter user

Surely he is innocent until found guilty. Just because you think he committed a crime doesn't mean he actually did.

You think he would've settled for $40mil and heightened personal scrutiny if he was innocent?

He talks about this in the latest TED talk. Supposedly banks were refusing to give Tesla loans unless he settled with the SEC

It's very surpring that he wouldn't admit being guilty and would find excuses instead :)

People settle all the time even if they are innocent. There are a variety of reasons such as the cost of the lawsuit and the negative press from the trial.

Yes, Elon was unlawfully pressured to settle with the SEC against his will or best interests.

At the time Tesla was in a "precarious" financial position with the Model 3 ramp up. The banks told Elon they would suspend his lines of credit/hold loans if he did not immediately settle with the SEC.

He chose to settle with the SEC and admit to lying when he did not in order to save Tesla from going bankrupt. All of this aligns with publicly known information.

If we lived in a functional open society this claim would result in a special counsel investigation into the SEC and the responsible banks, with multiple bureaucrats ending up behind bars.

It sounds like "the banks," who would be in an even more privileged position to know if the $420 offer was legitimately secured, also thought it was not. Doesn't really help Elon's case. It is also not the story he told in 2018 when he was still fighting the charges.

> a special counsel investigation into the SEC and the responsible banks, with multiple bureaucrats ending up behind bars.

lol

>It sounds like "the banks," who would be in an even more privileged position to know if the $420 offer was legitimately secured

Speculation. What's not speculation however is that the company suffered material harm as a byproduct of malicious prosecution.

If I, as a government employee, open a public investigation into someone whom I know to be innocent and cause that entity harm I have incurred liability. The SEC knew Elon had the funding, they used weasel words to imply he did not. The SEC would have lost in court. _All_ contracts have contingencies, this was no different. Saying that because a contingency existed the funds were "not secure" is horsecrap.

> The SEC knew Elon had the funding

Do you have proof - or even evidence - that Musk had funding, let alone that the SEC knew he had funding, other than Musk's own statements?

This is sort of exactly the thing I mean. Even if you don't agree with me that Elon is a serial liar, I don't think you can dispute a more generous characterization of him as having a long history of optimistically interpreting the facts in his favor. Why on earth would you take this claim at face value?

Why on earth would you believe an industry that’s committed to serial mistruth?

Reuters today disgraced themselves, it’s beyond embarrassing.

I don't have 'anger' towards him, although I certainly have an opinion about whether he is trustworthy or genuinely civic-minded, as I do about many other incredibly powerful political-business operators who collectively set the terms of public life.

Of course, I'm also baffled that people credit him as being a 'builder' rather than an extremely successful marketer and financial engineer, especially at the expense of all the people who, you know, actually do the building...

Musk is an engineer. That is just a fact about him. There are repeated comments to this effect from people who have worked with him, including famously well regarded engineers. If you watch his 3-part Starbase tour with Everyday Astronaut it is incredibly obvious. Some quotes to this effect, though certainly not all, have been collated at [1].

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/k1e0ta/eviden...

Do you think engineers are fundamentally/inherently "trustworthy or genuinely civic-minded"? If not, how does this concern browserman's point?

I was addressing the second paragraph, not the first.

The word "engineer" does not appear in browserman's post except to say Musk is one, and "builder" is not a synonym of "engineer".

Now this is just playing semantic games. Nobody has ever claimed Musk is building Tesla's cars or SpaceX's rockets by hand. Obviously those are built by the factories and the people employed their for that purpose.

There is no way browserman's point was legitimately something not contradicted by the quotes I linked.

> “He’s not afraid to get his hands dirty,” Mueller said. “He’s out there with his nice Italian shoes and clothes and has epoxy all over him. They were there all night and tested it again and it broke anyway.”

You think he didn't build anything? He wrote the code for his first startup and is the Chief designer at SpaceX. Listen to some of his interviews, especially by everyday astronaut. He is indeed the Chief Deigner.

I don't think he is a good marketer - he is more middle of the road. I think people say that to discredit him. Have you watched any of his full length presentations. He is terrible. What he is good at is having a vision he believes in. He sells that well.

>Of course, I'm also baffled that people credit him as being a 'builder'

I'm on the other hand baffled that so many here are willing to spout off opinions like this without even so much as having listened to the man talk. He is _clearly_ an engineer's engineer.

This topic really highlights the people who form their entire mental model of reality around news headlines.

I agree that he is great at talking.