Strange hill to die on. Lots of people scam by expecting to right their wrongs in the end. Hell even Theranos may have believed with enough scam money they could eventually have made right with the tech. Still a scam. Same here. If it’s not what you’re selling, it’s a lie, and a lie is a scam.

> Strange hill to die on

Not at all strange. The problem is that scam has certain meaning and if we use scam more liberally we dilute the meaning.

If every company is a scam(as almost everyone intentionally overhypes or does something similar to humane), then no company is a scam. Is google a scam as they scripted the gemini video?

> Is google a scam as they scripted the gemini video?

That video was more of a fraud than a scam, but I think we're just splitting hairs at that point.

I think the issue here is that arguably startup culture has _redefined_ scam to _not include_ "fake it till you make it gotta get funding" bullshit. In a previous era that stuff might arguably have been non-controversially been though of as a kind of scam. My own experience with startups is that they often hew as close to the line of scam as they can get away with and this behavior has been normalized.

This has nothing to do with startup or current times. That's why I gave example of Google. Google is not a scam in my definition but still has clearly faked gemini demo. Even Wright brothers admitted to faking a lot of news and claims before they could make real working planes.[1][2]

[1]: https://www.nps.gov/teachers/classrooms/the-wright-brothers-...

[2]: http://wright-brothers.wikidot.com/

It still counts as a scam even if someone eventually succeeds. Whether the given thing is a scam depends on whether, at the moment of utterance, the statement is a lie meant to accomplish some goal or not. It doesn't exclude the possibility that success might happen someday. This is what I mean about the bizarre morals of startup hustler types. Lying to extend your runway is still lying and normal people still think its a scam.

Do you use any word to distinguish what google did in my example vs what theranos/FTX did? Or would you put both in the same category as one small lie is same as basing existence of a company on lie.

Is this the same google that raised money under the motto “don’t do evil”?

Google raised money under the motto of:

>Digital Library, “birds of a feather” identified inside sea of information so communities and groups could be tracked in an organized way

"Highlands Forum", DLI (NSF, NASA and DARPA), MDDS program, In-Q-Tel etc

https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/how-the-cia-made-goo...

> The problem is that scam has certain meaning and if we use scam more liberally we dilute the meaning

Language is not something you can manipulate so easily and you absolutely cannot fight language changing, but also I promise that no one is diluting the meaning "scam".

Saying google is scam similar to theranos/FTX dilutes the word scam.

If my boss uses my social security number to get a credit card it's not "diluting" the word fraud just because SBF also did fraud at a much larger scale.

But like sure, tilt at that windmill.

No kidding. I get the sentiment but the argument doesn’t hold water. A scam is a scam. There are big scams and small. There are lies big and small too. We can even call the small ones white lies. But they are still lies.

Is selling something knowing that it can never deliver on the promise a scam? I think so. P.T. Barnum hawked shows outside the tent that couldn't deliver inside. Theranos could never deliver. Nor Magic Leap. Nor Elon on his crazy promises!

They're all scammers.

They did deliver, the device does mostly all the things that were shown in the demo and Marques shows most of it.

is it incredibly bad at doing such things? yes.

is a smartphone a much better device at doing all the things the AI pin does? yes as well.

So i wouldn't call it a scam, its just a bad product.

lol SpaceX has literally doubled the number of successful rocket launches since 2020

Despite this (and SpaceX seems to be the company of his that he is least involved in on a day to day basis) he has made many documented false promises. Playing with rockets shouldn’t excuse that https://elonmusk.today/

SpaceX was the company he was most involved, and still is pretty involved. Just watch any factory tour he made, be it the 2005 ones or the new Texas ones. Or hear what people who worked with him talk.

And I can't trust that site. An example:

    3,129 days since Elon Musk said Teslas would have 1,000 kilometer (621 mile) range within a year or two. (9/23/2015)

    "My guess is probably we could break 1,000 kilometers within a year or two. I'd say 2017 for sure."

An altered quote taken out of context. Here what he actually said from the interview[1]:

    Q: When will we break the 1000km range mark for an electric car?

    M: A thousand kilometers, hmm. Well, it depends under what circumstances for a thousand kilometers. As it is, the record right now for Model S is 800 km. That is the furthest that anyone has driven a Model S...

    Q: So we could be close?

    M: Yeah, we're pretty close. Now, in order to do that they did drive at a relatively slow speed. So, you know, we're taking, I think they drove maybe at 40 or 50 km/h or something like that. But I think, my guess is probably we could break a 1000km within... a year or two?

    Q: Okay, so within 2016 maybe even?

    M: I say if you say 2017 I'd say 2017 for sure.

His prediction turned out completely accurate[2].

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bl5vLC3Xlgc&feature=youtu.be...

2: https://electrek.co/2017/08/04/a-tesla-model-s-100d-just-dro...

And FSD is still not out, let alone robo taxis. Elon bullshits and sometimes it works out and sometimes it doesn't.

Well it is "out" and now everyone has it

As one of those people, it's pretty bad, especially at navigation which Navigate on Autopilot was very good at

Can't wait for his BS about record number of activations this quarter after he force activated it on the fleet

That said, if it weren't for all the lies and hype, we'd probably all be blown away by what it can do

Teslas can self-drive from NY to LA all on their own? That's out, and everyone has it? That's what was promised.

If you sell someone a cherry pie to be delivered tomorrow, take nearly a decade, and end up handing them a bag of cherries and a dusting of flour with a label of "cherry pie" on it, you didn't meet your promises.

You're vigorously agreeing.

I watched a paraplegic man play chess with his mind a few weeks ago. To put Elon on the same list as Theranos seems inaccurate.

Crediting Elon with everything he company's do doesn't strike me as fair or accurate

It's one of the number one reasons I'd never work for him. Every failure is your fault and every success is his. Yet all he contributes is tweets

When has Elon said that the failures are the faults of his employees? Hell, he seldom claims that it's his success. Every Starship test flight he's congratulated the team for a job well done.

It's the random people constantly looking for excuses to not believe his successes ("he doesn'thave much to do with SpaceX" or "he stole Tesla"), as well as idiotic article headlines ("Elon Musk's SpaceX does X" etc) that have made up those ideas.

Elon is quite unique in the sense that:

- he can identify incredibly good companies and products, and (usually) is able to lift them up, fund them, and leave them mostly be. It's not him running Tesla day-to-day (nor was tesla started by him), nor is it him running SpaceX, nor...

- at the same time, everything that he's involved in directly is just abysmally stupid

Your post may or may not be correct, but does not answer the question in the comment you were responding to and has zero supporting arguments for both assertions you make.

Why don’t you think it’s fair or accurate to credit founders with the work their companies do?

Do we credit calculus to Isaac Newton, the guy who invented it, or to Charles II, the random schmuck who happened to be king at the time? Why on earth should we give founders credit for work done by other people?

Musk is a lazy ketamine addict. He doesn't do anything other than tweet at himself from his alt accounts and fail upward, disproving meritocracy in the process.

I didn’t ask about kings, repeating the question to help you:

> Why don’t you think it’s fair or accurate to credit founders with the work their companies do?

Also do you have any evidence for the either of the two attacks on Musk?

It is not fair when it deprives the people working in the company of the recognition. Those people are critical to the successes.

Why do you think crediting founders with the work their companies do means that people working in the company cannot also be credited?

They can, and they should. Sometimes it is done. But to me it feels that many times a disproportionate amount of credit goes to founders/CEOs. People even fighting over whether for example Elon is successful or not, and completely disregarding everyone else in the organization. Or course the organizations are complex, but also mostly opaque - we do not know who does what.

Musk regularly lies and cannot be trusted.

He places a lot of bets, though, and that some of those bets may pay off in no way takes away from the fact that he engages in pretty scammy behavior.

In my view, his SOP is pretty much exactly what Theranos tried to do: fake it (scam) until you make it.

Theranos faked blood test results. This is not the same thing as ‘being slow at delivering self driving’ to quote one of the other people in this thread.

Musk faked demos of FSD. What's the difference?

Not getting treated for a disease you have, or taking medication for a disease you don’t have, versus buying something that wasn’t yet as good as the product video.

There's certainly a difference in terms of the possible severity of the impact of the two things, but that doesn't speak to whether or not they're both scam behavior.

If you're claiming things about your product or service that aren't true (even if they may become true eventually), and especially if you're faking evidence to support your lies, you're scamming.

People have died due to someone believing that a Tesla could handle normal driving conditions when it could not. That doesn’t seem like an incredibly huge gap in terms of impact.

This site[1] actually collects and lists the statements and highlights how long it's been since he said them.

1: https://elonmusk.today

And I can't trust that site. An example:

    3,129 days since Elon Musk said Teslas would have 1,000 kilometer (621 mile) range within a year or two. (9/23/2015)

    "My guess is probably we could break 1,000 kilometers within a year or two. I'd say 2017 for sure."

An altered quote taken out of context. Here what he actually said from this interview[1]:

    Q: When will we break the 1000km range mark for an electric car?

    M: A thousand kilometers, hmm. Well, it depends under what circumstances for a thousand kilometers. As it is, the record right now for Model S is 800 km. That is the furthest that anyone has driven a Model S...

    Q: So we could be close?

    M: Yeah, we're pretty close. Now, in order to do that they did drive at a relatively slow speed. So, you know, we're taking, I think they drove maybe at 40 or 50 km/h or something like that. But I think, my guess is probably we could break a 1000km within... a year or two?

    Q: Okay, so within 2016 maybe even?

    M: I say if you say 2017 I'd say 2017 for sure.

His prediction turned out completely accurate[2].

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bl5vLC3Xlgc&feature=youtu.be...

2: https://electrek.co/2017/08/04/a-tesla-model-s-100d-just-dro...

So you think it’s “bullshit” because it accurately states his 2017 timeframe and here in 2024 the longest range model is still half that?

https://www.tesla.com/model3

One hypermiler reporting a long range under perfect conditions is not how any normal buyer is going to interpret that claim.

Model S is 402mi (EPA range). Thats not 1000km, but its much more than half.

But one hypermiler reporting a long range under perfect conditions is exactly what he described at length while making that claim. It was pretty clear to me. And that was exactly what we got in 2017.

If one wants to lie by twisting what he said, what happened or putting purposefully out of context to gain clicks or drive up hate against the guy, that is another thing. You should not do that. Nowhere he said what the site or you are implying.

I'm tired how people are getting radicalized because they hear absurd things ("pizzagate") and instead of doubting it they believe it and become outraged. If you actually hear people talking, they are usually much more reasonable than what they seem if you just take a few of the most negative phrases out of context.

It takes a lot of effort to undo fake news. A few more examples from that website:

"Rocket Fuel Solves Climate Change", an absurd extrapolation on what was probably a tweet about ISRU for Mars.

And this juxtaposition that makes you think he just sold what was paid to them, when instead it is 10% of what they had bought previously if you actually follow the link:

Hodl [Link]

    1,120 days since Elon Musk promised to hold bitcoin instead converting it. (3/24/2021)

    "Bitcoin paid to Tesla will be retained as Bitcoin, not converted to fiat currency."
    Elon Musk in a Tweet

    1,087 days since Elon Musk converted $272 million to fiat currency. (4/26/2021)
    As reported by Nate DiCamillo in yahoo! finance

You might argue that the second move goes against the spirit of what he said in the tweet and all that, but you have to agree with me that this site is being purposefully deceitful on how it is presenting this to promote hate and radicalize more the people.

I watched a "locked in" man use a computer mouse with a brain implant in 2002. It remains to be seen if this is actually better than what's been done before other than torturing a bunch of monkeys running needless experiments.

Also I doubt Musk had much to do with the brain implant other than being someone to push people forward and being a bag of money for it. Did he design the implant? Did he insert it? Did he code it?

Goalposts: moved.

Agreed, Musk seems to have bought and paid for mostly legitimate companies, and most "broken promises" seem to come from how desperate he is for attention on Twitter, often at the reputational detriment of said companies. If anything, he's just lucky his first big break company was PayPal, not Theranos.

Probably most people are sad he went from cool sci-fi CEO to weird divorced dad energy on bird website CEO.

enough of "hubris and overconfidence" and you do cross into full-on scam territory