The Tesla owners I know are all happy with their Teslas.
> whether he's just been lucky
Being successful once might be luck. Being successful twice looks like business acumen. Being successful 3 times is business genius.
Bill Gates was successful 3 times, so was Steve Jobs.
Being successful in two unrelated industries, rockets and cars, is very very unusual. The number of successful new car manufacturers from scratch in the last 100 years or so is about zero (Delorean, Tucker, Bricklin, etc.) which makes Tesla all the more impressive.
> Now he's waded into one of the most difficult lines of business
Harder than car manufacturing or making rockets? Twitter is nothing compared to that.
It's a good thing the natural laws of Newtonian physics also covers content moderation. /s
I was happy enough. I won't buy another. There's another data point for you.
But putting aside anecdotes, I'm talking about things we know Tesla has done. Like taking away battery capacity (with no compensation) for existing owners in order to reduce liability risk for the company. Or how about deciding to take away features from individual customers because they've determined that customer should never have had the feature? Something that costs Tesla nothing but is a great big middle finger to their customers.
Anyone who buys a Tesla knowing their record of screwing over their own customers is foolish.
> Harder than car manufacturing or making rockets? Twitter is nothing compared to that.
It's worse. Much worse. With sufficient cash I can go hire an incredible amount of expertise building both cars and rockets. Rocketry in particular is an engineering problem. Twitter is a human nature problem. Good luck with that. And especially Elon, who has questionable social skills to begin with.
Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson are pretty good arguments against this.
Take a look at the growing graveyard of failed small launch startups. Sure, rockets are mostly just engineering these days, but it is still very difficult engineering.
SpaceX was the also first to reuse an orbital rocket booster. They have now done so 150 times. It's hard to understate how big of a deal this is, to not throw away your rocket every time you launch it. And they are on the cusp of a fully reusable rocket with Starship.
Elon Musk is an arrogant asshole, at the least. But you are really downplaying the accomplishments of SpaceX.
Those are tiny examples that only applied to a really small number of users. Hardly some grand plans of fraud.
More relevant things would be FSD not being transferable, at least while its in Beta. That is actually user hostile.
I mean, is there any direction besides down that it is possible for Elon to punch?
How regularly? Examples aside from "pedo guy"? Which I think all, including himself, would agree was a punch down.
> Tesla is a famously consumer-hostile company.
It seems to me that being a technology company in addition to being a car company, Tesla's buyers are more likely than other brands' buyers to complain on the internet. And every supposed journalist knows that a Tesla hit piece will garner clicks.
Initially, Consumer Reports seemed to really like Tesla. But much more recently, they have not generally rated Tesla comparable to other cars. They only have one model (the Model 3) that even scored average.
One of their issues is that they like to move fast in their designs. Changing sensors, suppliers, components etc. means it's really hard to nail reliability and quality. As the saying goes...move fast and, well...break things.
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/17/cars/tesla-consumer-reports-d...
In any case, by consumer hostile I mean: Tesla will turn features off on your car if it believes you are not entitled to them. Sometimes years later. They may cut your battery range significantly because it presents a fire risk, without ever 1) asking, 2) compensating you, or 2) fixing the battery. They may turn off the radar you bought with your car. They take liberties with the OTA updates that warn me away from wanting to buy another Tesla. Fortunately the competition in the EV space has gotten really good in the last couple years and is accelerating.
He was punching up plenty. He has always been combative and would respond 2x to each perceived insult. He sued DoD and NASA. He went after the large car companies. He went after Bezos when Bezos was pretending BlueOrigin is even remotely in the same league as SpaceX.
But at this point, there is not many place to punch but down.
I'm also not a fan of twitter thing and its certainty a part of his character that is not flattering.
Elon recently 'punched up' against Hillary Clinton (only using the word 'punch' because of context here; actually it was a gentle questioning of a propagandistic line she was trying to push). I've also seen him lightly mock Joe Biden.
And Tesla is a famously consumer-hostile company. We don't need more success like that. SpaceX is a much better example, and a lot of that can be attributed to how well he delegated leadership to someone competent.
Now he's waded into one of the most difficult lines of business and we'll find out in the next couple of years whether he's just been lucky and well-funded, or if he really is a business genius.