That's actually pretty common among those "gifted with mild ASD/ADHD" types, they can't be assed to talk about anything that doesn't pique their interest. I struggled with it a lot until I learned to be more social with other folks' topics of discussion. I think Elon is the logical endpoint of what happens when you have zero pressure to socially accommodate.
It does seem like he's increasingly emboldened to act an ass since being crowned world's richest man.
One thing that almost everybody on HN should be able to judge as completely wrong is his claim about "L5 autonomy very close / later this year" [1].
L5 autonomy is the equivalent of the halting problem. L5 is a goal that can't be achieved [2], just like no program can be written that determines if the input program will ever terminate. [3]
So what to make of this, if this apparently smart guy says entry-level stupid things?
[1]: https://electrek.co/2020/07/09/tesla-tsla-elon-musk-level-5-...
[2]: https://macdailynews.com/2019/01/07/waymo-ceo-level-5-fully-...
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem
Edit: Because so many replies here about why I compare it to the Halting problem: That comparison is invalid as many of you pointed out. My reasoning was not in a strict mathematical sense, but more like this: even experienced humans can't drive in every condition. There are situations where you just need to stop. L5 autonomy will only work if we create AGI (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligenc...), so that the system can observe itself and think about itself. An AGI might be possible (in the far future), whereas the Halting problem is mathematically impossible. Thanks for pointing this out.
There is absolutely nothing fundamental that makes L5 autonomy impossible, while the halting problem is provably impossible, as normally formulated.
I don't know how close or far away L5 autonomy is, but it's definitely theoretically reachable, while the halting problem is always going to be impossible.
A car that would complete all the trips I'm willing to complete, and some more, but refuses under some circumstances (e.g. whiteout blizzard conditions) would be a L4 vehicle under the ISO definition.
Can drive in approximately the same set of conditions as a human (professional driver?), possibly being unwilling to drive in certain (seldom encountered) conditions where most humans would, but offset by being willing to drive in conditions few people would.
Importantly, the car must avoid completely giving up on driving mid trip (as opposed to deciding "too dangerous, turn around and go back at next opportunity"), unless conditions are comparable to those in which a human would give up mid trip (which are pretty limited, as humans seldom just stop and give up on the road unless the car is broken down, or fully stuck. At worst, in some really bad conditions, humans may pull other to wait for the storm/extreme-fog/etc to blow over.)
"My BMW still drove during the snows in February, but my neighbor's Tesla said it wouldn't drive 2 of the days." "Yah, but mine doesn't insist that the windows are perfectly clean and pristine before starting a trip!"
We probably should never have had level 5, but split L4 into a couple levels: heavily geofenced/restricted vs. relatively unlimited applicability with some restrictions.
I interperate your comparison to the halting problem to mean that even if we ignore the feasability of a particular solution, it is literally an impossible problem to solve.
My understanding of L5 is driving without external human intervention. In one sense we already have the technology to do that - our brians. It would never be feasible (or ethical), but if we could put a human brain inside every tesla, wouldn't that achieve L5?
* Level 5 is a vehicle that never needs a human to take over and can drive in "all conditions". Humans do not meet this driving standard.
* Level 4 is a vehicle, that within a set of vehicle-defined conditions can drive the vehicle without a human ever having to take over. It refuses to drive unless the conditions are met.
So a level 4 car could be a vehicle that can drive in a 1 block area of residential streets only... or something that can drive in way more conditions than I could safely attempt, but refuses to drive in say, whiteout blizzard conditions at night.
It would achieve L5 of a sort, but people don't usually mean "L5 autonomy" in the sense of "capable of crashing the vehicle deliberately to protest the horror of their existence".
Not saying he's right, but find me a company that doesn't polish their own turds, even just a little bit. Everyone trying to sell something is painting the best picture of their product possible.
Then he claimed we'd have that solved by 2023.
Not sure what the upside is of being known for repeatedly making non-rational predictions and being wrong.
It can significantly move markets in the short term, which he seems to have become adept at doing over the last few years. And unfortunately, the stock market isn't really interested in long-term thinking, it's largely about breaking news and twitter rumors nowadays.
But, the degree of absurdity across predictions undermines even that strategy over time. I think he does himself a disservice here. He should get out of his own way and allow his actual achievements to speak louder than irrational predictions (and other distractions).
Intellectually everyone can deduct that a long distance hyperloop is science fiction, ridiculously expensive, complicated, and will likely face long outages at any incident (see the channel tunnel, but like if it was 10-100x as long and a vacuum). But because Musk says it with Confidence, an army of fans jumps onto it.
Your claim conflates a nebulous, squishy, human goal with a formally and rigorously proven mathematical problem. The only support offered is links to wikipedia and news articles, none of which help connect the two in an equally formal and rigorous fashion.
However, for L5, you just have a quote saying it doesn't work. We know it is mathematically possible for L5 to work because, well, humans perform at that level. We know that our vision, our ears, our hands and senses are enough input to solve the problem.
Do you have a direct connection between them or are you just using it as a metaphor for an unsolvable problem?
Which is not only funny, it's exactly why the halting problem is so hard…
Personally I think full auto-drive requires us to change to the roads to make them work for machines... but that's a different story.
Or is this FSD in the sense of "my car can drive itself home after dropping me off" type of thing?
I am not convinced that L5 is fundamentally impossible (unless we posit that humans are also not L5 autonomous, which I suppose one could argue, as they are prone to driving errors). Granted I subscribe to Universality, and assume that humans are not capable of hyper-computation.
But as far as Musk, yes he lies and isn't shy about it. It's shameless and overt. Perhaps he justifies it as being part of his job.
Recently he said "complexity and cost of a car is greater than that of a humanoid robot".
Musk looked bored with Tim, was often evasive, gave the appearance of wanting to get away from a fanboy.
The few times he would "open up" it was more like a recitation from someone to a disinterested audience — or as though Musk's mind was somewhere else, not really engaged or focused on the interviewer.
EDIT: Skimming the two-part interview again, Musk seems to switch between seemingly being engaged to not. Maybe it is because the interview went on really long and appears to be uncut.
I think it's telling that he didn't tell Tim to scram or he even got that close of a look at all. If he wanted to get away, he could have easily done so.
The disparity is even more obvious in the pressers when reporters ask typical reporter questions, vs when someone (often Tim, but there are others) asks something technical.
Can you even imagine being Musk and running an EV company and a rocket company and having to field questions from your typical journalists? Like that Q from a journalist about why the new image of the black home at the center of our galaxy is so blurry: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31353677.
Later on when he was giving that update at Starbase he mentioned the heat shield and thanked someone for a "robust" shield. I couldn't quite tell if he was being sarcastic or not.
Having said that, Musk is pretty much the worst communicator i've ever heard at the C suite level. I hope/pray he's better when talking to direct reports trying to get his crazy ass ideas and timelines done. Those poor poor people if he's not...
Despite people in tech conflating ASD/ADHD and using them as some kind of weird bragging right (and excuse for not considering others), I don't know that there is any public information about his having either condition.
> He seems to open up more when talking to people he considers "on his level" or at least deeply interested in what he is interested in.
That's just called childish behavior, and despite it's name it is common in a lot of adults, not just Musk.
But most adults who act that way can't get away with it. When it is paired with wealth and a megaphone as it is with Musk and others like him, not only can they get away with it, but it can be amplified by a mass following of people who wish they could get away with it, and live vicariously through them. That is basically how cults work.
> That's just called childish behavior,
That's pretty judgy, IMHO.
> But most adults who act that way can't get away with it. When it is paired with wealth and a megaphone as it is with Musk and others like him, not only can they get away with it, but it can be amplified by a mass following of people who wish they could get away with it, and live vicariously through them.
True.
I punch up. Even if he has Aspergers, with his amount of wealth and power he doesn't get to escape my judgement.
He’s posting his cold brew pics to Twitter. Caffeine is a psychoactive substance that can foster manic behavior. Lack of sleep can create cognitive stability issues. Been there with both.
Who knows if he’s taken other things here and there as Mr Private Plane bounces around socializing.
Despite Twitter, how much of Elon’s life we don’t see is significant.
It's a shame that these are so often the takeaways from a show that is at its core about a group of people with different skillsets and backgrounds working together with mutual trust and respect to further a common goal.
As a comparison, back the day I t liked Babylon 5 better. Tried watching it again and just couldn't the way I can always rewatch ST TNG, DS9 or even Voyager.
On the other hand there is the fact that Starfleet is the de-facto military junta, a morally fine one of course. Or moral high horse crap like the prime directive. The overall optimism is good so, and especially DS9 did a good job in showing the ambivalency that comes from ideals meeting real politics. E.g. the arc between Sisko and the Maquis, having Sisko side with, of all people, war criminal Dukat.
I guess you could kind of apply it to Musk in that he seems to revel in being something of a jerk, but (in the view of someone who's been very skeptical of Musk for a while) it's not an all-consuming thing.
1. They still need to follow the basic rules of society, i.e. people haven't started "God-Emperor Elon" memes yet, so not every single person is going to bow down.
2. Before they've achieved amazing success, they aren't 100% confident in their other-wordly abilities. Now, given his success with PayPal, Tesla, and Space-X, it's easy for him to believe his own press.
Thus, Elon is now at the point where all of his negative traits are essentially allowed to "run wild" because they are constrained neither by society at large, nor his own doubts.
See for instance https://youtu.be/ye8zcgxWMDc where he only stays as it's a major presse event (the guy buy his side was running for chancellor to succeed Merkel; and yeah the questions were "dumb" but with your questions you won't get a better response)
Agreed. Musk has gone full Assange.
Baring literal children isn't legal!
You can use thermo to build civilization, but you can't use a cello to do that!
> I don't see how anything but hubris can make someone see differently.
We don't know the context of this conversation with Musk. In "just between us engineers" conversations, there's plenty of hubris to go around. It's not just engineers, of course. Many of the highly educated professionals I know will express demeaning opinions about religious people or rural folks after a few drinks.
To be clear, I don't think being condescending is a virtue. But I don't see any reason to single Musk out for that specifically. I don't see him talking shit about how stupid everyone is, like many people do.
Depends on how you define “civilization”!
That would Provo be because the attached attic sis related to belong musk not “everybody” and “many people”.
Somebody like Anish Giri might be a very good sport and play a (very short) game of chess with me, but I doubt he would expect to learn anything from it. Of course, he probably wouldn't waste his time on me. Either way, he would still be a great asset to help somebody like Ian Nepomniachtchi prepare for a tournament.
Of course, being considerate and welcoming to everybody all the time is super awesome. Those who manage it have my respect whether they are perceived as the best in their field or not.
This is how the 10% end up with 5 jobs in 8 years, watching those who they thought were beneath them rise up and take leadership positions because they're too much of a pain in the ass to work with.
What's happening is, you have a person (Elon) of exceptional intelligence, so they can recognize a thing or concept and instantly follow it out to rational conclusions faster than the people around them, but they have not developed their intuitive side and don't respect the empty part, the unknown part, of the problem space.
It's like that halting problem thing: they become so accustomed to being able to see 'the answer' that they get blind to the mystery, the ambiguity of the non-answers and the areas where a real innovation will come from. They're not surprised by anything, or surprisable, so they become a specific kind of intelligent, very very quick and correct.
If you're a designer/inventor/artist type person you rely much more heavily on the non-answer spaces because those are where you work. That's not Elon. He has people for that, and takes the credit for their work, and impresses them so much with his ability to be quick that they go right along with it. In real terms they could not get their stuff done without him as that ringleader, figurehead, the 'Mr. Outside' there to impress the masses and get them to give him their money. It's a symbiotic relationship and Elon has done that over and over.
Don't look to Elon personally to have the revolutionary idea. However, if you show him one, he may well see where it leads way quicker than you do… and take it, and make a business out of it, and then hire you and have you doing it whilst taking a big cut of what you earn from it.
In this way Elon 'gets' capitalism as well and quickly as he gets everything else. He's definitely the man for late stage capitalism.
Lets get one thing straight. If you are on the spectrum, the reason you act like this is because you don't understand that you are doing something wrong. Its a spectrum, normally around social interaction, and not understanding, or being able to pick up on the slow of social information.
However for most high functioning people it is possible, with work, to mitigate those "negative" qualities.
It is not an excuse to be a dick. What Elon is doing is a choice. He is perfectly capable of interacting with people enough to have a series of relationships with people without making them feel like shit. I would therefore postulate that whilst he might be on the spectrum, he has worked hard to mitigate it.
What Elon is, is a rich school boy.
This might be a nitpick, I wouldn't describe it as an "understanding" problem. Usually we understand that there are social cues and what they mean (at least in the mild cases). The difference is in the strength of that signal.
It's like as if people have a warning indicator when doing things socially inept. Most folks seem to have a loud klaxon "You are being an ass! Stop that!". With ASD, it's more like a quiet "check engine" light that's easy to overlook.
If you never experience the social pressure to actively look for that indicator light (see exhibit E.), you never really build strong social graces. Or, maybe you just don't give a damn about masking, too tired, just not interested.
I strongly feel this is the case with not only Musk, but a lot of high ranking "leaders"; I believe that you need an amount of ruthlessness, of indifference, an ability to turn off your morals to be in that position and get even richer. I mean just look at how he fucks his staff over and expects them to work ridiculous hours, bragging about how much he works (the difference being he gets paid for every second he is alive, while staff only gets paid for contract hours).
Yes, it is more complex than simply "mind over matter", but it's still an important development milestone.
completely untrue, nearly all autistic people I know including me are hyper-aware of social situations and specifically act in ways to avoid being a dick. this is a pop-psychology notion of autism.
Now, I don't think Musk never faced consequences when he was young, and never learned this stuff, but I do think he faces absolutely no consequences today, and is happy to not put in any effort.
Somebody on the outside might see a big difference in result, say a 50% approval rating vs a 35% approval rating. But from the inside it can all look the same: "everybody hates me anyway" or "most people love me anyway".
my late step-father would say this person needs an "ass-whoopin"
No, it's actually because you don't think it's wrong in the first place.
I understand why people prefer to lie to protect other's emotions, or why people prefer being high-status rather than being right, but I disagree with that, I think it's wrong.
Sometimes, you know it’s wrong, at least at some level, but are so fucking tired of masking all the time you just do it anyway.
I feel like "masking" is being used for "be polite". I didn't decide to be rude, I decided not to mask my disability.
That is bullshit.
People on the spectrum may have a harder time understanding what is rude, and that may give some passes when you don't realize it. But if you decide to ignore what you've learned is rude, you're just an ass.
And "going to bathroom and not pissing on the floor" is physical labor. Even more so if you are on crutches.
I completely disagree with your artificial distinction between "being respectful to others" and "politeness". Politeness is defined as being respectful to others
We all benefit from a more polite interaction. To refuse to be polite because it requires effort is just taking advantage of the system without paying it back.
You can also be rich and relatively unknown, most rich people are. He chooses to be super public.
Does it? I know literally nothing about the personality of the Wright brothers. Or Henry Ford. Or Thomas Edison. Their legacy is their inventions. Hype and media coverage are temporary at best. And unfortunately, Musk's hype and media presence tends to show him at his worst. I'm not sure whether Musk fans realize how many non-fans actually despise the guy. If anything, he's wrecking his legacy. Shut up and build stuff.
Meanwhile, there's great engineers working at both Tesla and SpaceX, but the only person you know is Elon.
Ford was pretty similar from my reading.
Both men had early career success and worked harder than most at achieving their goals. But their ongoing successes were very much political and public perception. Ford especially was incredibly politically active and noisy about it.
I imagine Elon's legacy (should he be remembered) will not be his twitter shitposting, but electric cars and rocketry.
Nobody remembers Ford's political activism. Apparently he ran for US Senate once and lost. Is there any reason to think that Ford's political activism had anything to do with the success of the Ford Motor Company?
Ford hyping cars is fine and expected. Ford hyping politics doesn't really seem to add anything. In fact, it appears that there were some antisemitic writings associated with Ford, there was a lawsuit and a consumer boycott, and he was forced to apologize.
A common fallacy is to assume that everything a successful person does in life contributes to their success. OJ Simpson was one of the greatest football running backs ever, and he was also a murderer. You might say, "if he wasn't a violent person, then he wouldn't have been a great running back", but somehow Barry Sanders managed not to murder anyone.
They represented the last effort after standing on the shoulders of giants, basically being the person who got to sign off the quality of life improvement and reap the financial reward. It happens, could have been somebody else but in the end it was them.
mr.Musk has been at the helm of Tesla for 20 years and his product is nor widespread (only 1% of total number of global vehicles sold in FY21) nor revolutionary from a quality of life standpoint (at the end of the day it's a car and you can hardly tell the difference between Tesla EVs and MercedesEQS, iBMW, Toyota EVs etc....if anything the Quality Of life gap is towards the other automakers)
The paradigm shift that gets to 95% marketshare before getting copied? Nowhere to be seen.
Tesla changed the way people feel about Tesla.
When people say they are not a car company they are right. They are a cult company. They sell cult. Of the techno-utopian kind.
Importantly, some of those people were in positions of influence at other auto manufacturers. So Tesla didn't have to capture 95% marketshare to change the industry.
I think that the blinding glamour of a Tesla has faded quite a bit. I think, 20 years on, we expect to see strong competition to them. The lane assist, the adaptive cruise control, the touch screen console... these are a bit boring now. Others have had them for a long time. Some probably had them before Tesla. Hopefully, several competitors will start offering 500 km range EVs. Tesla can still cult that advantage.
But the cult of Tesla scared established players. Everyone has scrambled to adapt since. And the public has been persuaded to keep the pressure on. Tesla represents an historic shift. I don't have to like them or buy them. But I recognize their place in history.
I'll go a step further and I can hardly tell the difference between a Tesla and a used ICE car.
But the hell with it...I can always delete it.
I think people are taking crazy pills, they religiously follow this guy and his delusions about becoming a multiplanetary specie before the Sun becomes a red giant....5 billions years from now.
As they have such thoughts they have to walk through human feces and scenes from the Walking Dead...only with the homeless instead of zombies.
Stuff that would scare them to death if they saw it in a movie or compel them to pity if they happened in the background of a live news reportage from Ukraine.
Instead it's happening under their nose as they wonder if Mars is ambitious enough or we should aim directly for the Andromeda Galaxy.
If he wants to make Starship a reality, he needs permits and government contracts.
I met an African-American man about ten years ago who owned an excellent patent portfolio covering technology like this
https://patents.google.com/patent/US6695260
but he was the only black person I've ever met who hated Barack Obama. He was an extreme Republican, thought Democrats all worked for the anti-Christ, etc.
I figured there was no way he'd succeed at what he was trying to do because he'd need to make nice with the government no matter who the administration was. I haven't heard from him again.
I see Musk going down the same road. I can only imagine the last man is dying on Earth 1000 years from now and cursing: "If only Elon Musk didn't have to post that tweet we would have made it to Mars."
No science says “yes rockets and spreading through the stars is definitely the future for humans.”
The odds he’s just exacerbating damaging industrial feedback loops and a worse mess for the future are much higher than successful Mars colonies and extrasolar expansion coming from his efforts
Elon really needs to focus on the energy and transportation thing that he really is good at.
* which ethical AI would that be?
* how many people has elon sent to mars now?
elon has marketed an image to people, one of a tony stark-like figure, that might do or say the wrong thing at the time, but who truly wants to make everything better.
the reality is that, whilst perhaps not a conman (although i find my opinion of him leaning to that end more each day), he’s definitely just another profit-driven business man, with little to no regard of the people around him. and probably a sociopath.
bill gates has done (a lot) more for humanity. and i’m not particularly fond of him, either.
There’s absolutely no guarantee he’s on the right track. Humans expanding away from Earth is as likely as us being able to rewrite the speed of light.
There’s no rewriting the fundamentals of reality. One really bad day and Mars colony is wiped out. How much damage we do here before getting there is a real concern.
Please, go on. I want to hear more about how thermodynamics can be waved away for “just an engineering project.”
This is what I mean. Obsession and success with engineering has titillated people to the point of blind faith. Externalities do not exist in their conceptual void. It’s become akin to unfalsifiable religious belief.
If humanity doesn't spend the resources on spreading humanity throughout the universe, then the resources will be spent on disposable plastic toys that fill landfills. It's not as if an edenic utopia is being despoiled for this boondoggle. Our environment isn't in its precarious state because of too much space travel. We're debating over the disposition of a tiny fraction of our dwindling material resources, negligible in the grand scheme.
> I want to hear more about how thermodynamics can be waved away for “just an engineering project.”
If we have a limited period before climate doomsday, then we'd better get cracking on space travel before it's too late.
Plus, it's often used as an excuse or a mark of honor; an excuse for unacceptable behaviour, and a mark of honor for being super smart and not like those Other Autists who struggle in their day to day.
The word has been besmirched by its namesake and the behaviour of those using it to distinguish themselves from "other" people with autism.
(My impression of his politics is more that they’re anarchic then left/right, but I’m not excited enough by his words to listen beyond the presentations and random support for e.g. UBI).
And possibly abduct or murder congresspeople (thinking of the guy with clearly visible tie wrap restraints, or the republican that was telling where to find democrat members of congress)
Let’s not act like our air gapped view of him through screens can provide an accurate diagnosis of real medical conditions
Tesla revenue for the quarter ending March 31, 2022 was $18.756B, a 80.54% increase year-over-year.
Tesla revenue for the twelve months ending March 31, 2022 was $59.810B, a 74.73% increase year-over-year.
Tesla annual revenue for 2021 was $53.823B, a 70.67% increase from 2020.
Tesla annual revenue for 2020 was $31.536B, a 28.31% increase from 2019.
Tesla annual revenue for 2019 was $24.578B, a 14.52% increase from 2018.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/TSLA/tesla/revenue
He called Vernon Unsworth a "pedo guy" in a tweet after he rescued all of those kids in Thailand and criticized Musk's plan to build a small submarine to get them out. That wasn't a joke, it wasn't meant to elicit a humorous response, it was clearly meant to defame someone. Notice that accusing folks of pedophilia has become a pretty common tactic for the right nowadays.
Calling someone a pedo seems pretty unhinged for a billionaire responsible for running major companies, it honestly surprised me how Musk would spend his public energy saying that kind of stuff, and especially when you consider the power dynamics involved, it's hard to interpret his actions as anything other than driven by insecurity. But I guess beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
https://www.businessinsider.co.za/elon-musk-pedo-guy-really-...
It doesn't really matter if this was intentional malice or reckless negligence. It was wildly, wildly unacceptable either way.
No, I'm a mature adult. Sure, I'll disagree with someone. Hell, I'll even say things like, "that was a bigoted statement", but I will never make up an insult to avenge an attack. I work every day to prevent that behaviour in my kids. I'm not going to replicate it in my life.
It's also not up to you to decide when someone "needs to get over it."
I read this as a polite way of saying he's up his own arse, which seems accurate.
I never liked him before and probably won't in the future. I doubt I'd like anybody who's literally dragging humanity into the future, but he is doing that.
Whether he's doing it right, or whether he's doing it well is an open question, but no other single person is to this degree shoving humanity forward this often and this much, as far as I know.
I remember listening to someone describe a conversation they had with him or where he was speaking, and he relayed that Elon was telling them that in his world he can't relate to people because to him its like everyone is a toddler mentally and he has to go down to their level....now, I just fully don't believe that, that sounds like the most contrived "I'm a genius peasants" story imaginable, something out of a movie.