Like is it ridiculous to print code out to "review"? Obviously, yes, but a few stupid ideas doesn't make someone an outright fraud.
I'll note that here I'm using fraud as I believe OP was using it, to indicate that someone is pretending to be something or have some talent that they do not.
IDK, I find "fraud" to be a weird criticism in general for Elon. Like he seems like he's kinda a huge asshole and he's really bad at estimates.
People in general seem to want to criticize people they don't like on multiple angles and often don't care if the other angles are true at all as long as one is. That kind of thing really irks me.
https://disconnect.blog/elon-musk-wants-to-relive-his-start/
1. Elon is 100% successful. ("As far as one could get")
2. "Fraud" means the opposite of success.
3. Elon is successful because SpaceX is successful.
4. SpaceX is successful because of the sheer tonnage of stuff they have thrown into space.
5. More stuff in space is better than less stuff in space.
Are any of these assumptions true? I wouldn't like to speculate, but I would at least claim that it's worth the debate.
Musk on the other hand has this odd issue of trying to overstate his accomplishments such as calling himself a founder of Tesla for some bizarre reason. I don’t know if imposter syndrome or what, but it’s been very detrimental for stockholders when he had Tesla rescue Solar City rather than letting it fail etc.
Making material statements about self driving was just dumb from a legal perspective compared to puffery, but hey it sold some cars and he’s not in prison so ehh it worked out.
Stock graph shows Tesla stock had no material impact from the Solar City purchase, 90% of it's value coming after 2020. Today, Tesla energy and solar dominates the industry to the point where every installer offers Tesla Solar including the largest US installer Sunrun.
The company was founded in July 1 2003, Musk didn’t even hear about the company until 2004. That’s a rather large gap to call someone a founder. But hey it’s an arbitrary distinction so feel free to disagree.
> Stock graph shows Tesla had no material impact from the Solar City Purchase
From the announcement of the purchase to its completion Tesla’s stock dropped ~20%.
Buying or creating a solar company in house made sense, over paying to bail out a relatives solar company he was involved with didn’t. Solar City was in 1.5 Billion dollars in debt, their business model was failing, and they had just laid off 20% of their workforce so yea Tesla shareholders got hosed.
> two guys, a name, an office, and an idea
Add in the paperwork they filled out and we call those things companies. The entire point of incubators like Ycombinator is getting companies to a point where someone would make a significant investment, Martin Eberhard, Marc Tarpenning and Ian Wright who joined a few months later pulled that first major hurdle off on their own.
If Musk had walked away they would’ve just kept looking because it was a very compelling investment as made clear by finding funding within a month of looking and the 1 million put up from a 3rd party.
He also materially over promised Starlink’s bandwidth for zero gain and meaningful legal risk. It’s a consistent pattern and worth remembering for both customers and investors. In 2020: “The speeds are still not as fast as what SpaceX originally claimed for the constellation, but they are slightly faster than what early user testing has shown.” https://www.theverge.com/2020/9/3/21419841/spacex-starlink-i... and in 2024 it’s still not there even if it’s a useful product anyway.
Regardless, that isn’t an argument worth making. Whataboutisms are silly.
In my experience people shout “whataboutisms” when they’re trying to justify their own bias.
And it's actually accurate. The driver is legally required, and it drives itself. Nobody said it drives perfectly.
Or pretending he had bigger parts in the development of companies which he actually bought after the work was done. Or selectively withdrawing Starlink access to entire regions on his own whims at critical moments. Or creating a special system to promote his own tweets above everyone elses.
Or covering up heinous and illegal animal abuse for Neuralink. Or setting us up for an ablation cascade. Or not paying rent in his offices. Or lying about his father's emerald mines in apartheid South Africa.
... I'm just saying - the anti-fraud he fuckin ain't.
Animal abuse?? Pray tell what happened Emerald mines? I thought that was debunked Starlink - I think he managed it extremely well.. and now there will be StarShield that our government controls Pretended - if it was all pretending, he wouldn’t be doing it over and over and over again.. he has made an incredible impact with these companies
Elon musk admitted his father owned a share in an apartheid emerald mine in a 2014 interview, an interview which has since been deleted without comment [1]. Kinda makes all the later denials look... Well, fraudulent.
"I thought that was debunked Starlink" - What? You gotta finish your sentences if you want to call people deranged bruh.
Kessler syndrome hasn't been debunked - ask Scientific American, or NASA. And he certainly did cut access to it during multiple crises, there's no shortage of sources for that.
> he has made an incredible impact with these companies
Certainly - but a lot of it is only spun to be positive and is in fact profoundly negative, if you think about it. Electric cars are not the way out of the energy crisis, public transportation is - which Musk has seemingly deliberately held back [2].
> "Musk admitted to his biographer Ashlee Vance that Hyperloop was all about trying to get legislators to cancel plans for high-speed rail in California—even though he had no plans to build it."
Lots of people get taken in by fraudsters. And you know what they do when the fraud is uncovered? Most often, they double down protecting the fraudster, often even lashing out at the messenger. Because admitting you got got is very hard on the ego. I believe in you electriclove - break your bubble.
0 - https://www.wired.com/story/neuralink-uc-davis-monkey-photos...
1 - https://web.archive.org/web/20140901222916/https://www.forbe...
2 - https://time.com/6203815/elon-musk-flaws-billionaire-visions...
The idea that Musk has single-handedly held back public transportation is funny. Musk has zero control over the California government that has failed multiple times in building high speed rail.
It doesn't, no. But it does mean that when he later claimed not to have anything to do with an emerald mine in apartheid SA, he was being knowingly fraudulent. And it takes no small effort to get articles taken down. If it weren't for the Internet Archive, there'd be no evidence he's lying when he says so.
In his own words [from 1 above, already linked]:
> This is going to sound slightly crazy, but my father also had a share in an Emerald mine in Zambia. I was 15 and really wanted to go with him but didn’t realize how dangerous it was. I couldn’t find my passport so I ended up grabbing my brother’s – which turned out to be six months overdue! So we had this planeload of contraband and an overdue passport from another person. There were AK-47s all over the place and I’m thinking, “Man, this could really go bad.”
Does that sound like something someone with an insubstantial share would do with their 15 year old? It's possible, I guess, and if you want to give him the benefit of the doubt on that you're welcome to. Seems naive though.
And the point wasn't that it got him his start, although it certainly didn't hurt. That's a strawman. The point was that Musk has denied having any part in an emerald mine since that interview to build his myth as an entirely self-made entrepreneur. Fraudulently.
> The idea that Musk has single-handedly held back public transportation is funny.
It sure is. Many people have had a part in driving America's infrastructure further into shambles, as they like things just as they are. Especially car makers. So hilarious.
However, if you read carefully over the thread so far, you'll see that no one actually made the claim that he "single-handedly" is responsible. Although, Musk himself seems happy to have had a part in it:
> As I’ve written in my book, Musk admitted to his biographer Ashlee Vance that Hyperloop was all about trying to get legislators to cancel plans for high-speed rail in California—even though he had no plans to build it.
- [from 2, also linked above]
He never said Hyperloop was great, just that it was a good idea.
Testimonies from SpaceX's own employees show that Musk is a capricious and immature meddler whose presence is to be managed and deflected rather than welcomed. His documented cronyism and looting of Tesla with his ridiculous and petulant demands for tens of billions in bonus compensation while threatening to leave the company if he doesn't get his way show that he treats Tesla as his personal piggybank rather than offering anything tangible, other than alienating Tesla's core demographic via his ill-considered tweets. Meanwhile, here on this site, every programmer knew he was a fraud of a manager the moment he ordered Twitter employees to print out their most recent code so that he could determine who to fire.
If Elon Musk didn't want to be called a liar, maybe he should try telling fewer lies?
If Elon is so horrific at SpaceX, why is it the only space organization (including NASA) able to innovate and ship anymore?
You can dislike his personality, but criticizing his performance is silly.
Willingness and the ability to try and fail.
They haven't really invented anything conceptually new, it's just NASA has to play politics to get it's funding.
Concepts are a dime a dozen. Making them work is where the real contribution lies.
Same happens in big organizations like IBM, Yahoo, and now Google. Urgency to deliver results is missing from a lot of orgs, especially the public sector.
It's not just SpaceX outperforming NASA, it's SpaceX outperforming everyone.
> Twitter dropped in value to just 25% of what it was.
It's a private company. You don't know the value.
> Racism and naziism are rampant, endless stream of bots pushing propaganda or porn
Maybe on your feed? Statistically, no.
> and has any advertiser actually come back?
Who knows. It's still running after firing anyone: that's the point.
Tesla was the first and still the only electric car player that matters.
Same with SpaceX and space.
Again: you can dislike Elon's personality or politics, but trying to attack his results is ridiculous.
Elmo himself unbanned the prominent whitesuppremacist and neonazi “Nick Fuentes”.[2]
Hate-speech has increased significantly [3], and of course the lying and hypocritical self-proclaimed stalwart of free speech threatens to silence researchers documenting this [4].
Of course these are not the only instances of Elon’s grotesque behaviour.
For example, the pathetic little boy thinks “cis” is an insult and had that coded into the platform. His platform has tons of documented cases where the platform selectively hides speech deemed against the in-groups he favours.
His platform also pushes the visibility of neonazis, bigots and white suprematists like catturd. He keeps inserting his worthless little tweets into my feed despite me blocking and muting him.
Kindly, stop licking the boot.
[1] https://fortune.com/2024/01/02/elon-musk-twitter-value-72-pe...
[2] https://www.axios.com/2024/05/03/elon-musk-nick-fuentes-x-ac...
[3] https://phys.org/news/2023-04-analysis-speech-significantly-...
[4] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/musk-threatens-to-sue-r...
You might want to pick up a few hobbies. Obsessing about a man this much is unhealthy unless you're in love.
Ever consider you may have some bias against him?
You do realise that people can be capricious, immature, meddling, petulant, etc. while still being skilled engineers? This history of science and engineering is rife with people who were brilliant in some ways and childish and dishonest in others.
It’s usually people who have hardly ever risked anything to start a business, nonetheless in a cutthroat industry.
If you gave most people $180 million, they’ll happily retire into the sunset, not invest it in very risky electric car and aerospace companies like Musk.
He risked everything he had.
He also came to this country with nothing but a suitcase, slept in youth hostels, and took sanitation jobs to support himself.
He's exactly the classic American self-made zillionaire industrialist.
As a rule most people, especially successful ones, are generally pleasant to interact with. They wouldn't be successful if they weren't.
There are some notable exceptions of course but as a rule: don't believe what you read about people and assume they're probably pretty pleasant to be around or work with.
It's not like they didn't have a chance to either, they all developed EVs as side projects [1]. Some of which were incredibly loved by their leasers (?) [2].
[1]: https://avt.inl.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/fsev/HistoryOfEl...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Killed_the_Electric_Car%3F
What Musk did is:
1. add regenerative braking
2. design the look of the car to be exciting
Those two things are the critical engineering innovations Musk did.
To clarify some of those things: Self driving car, Flying Tesla Roadster, "Funding secured"
Not a chance. It would be worthwhile to read a biography of Musk.
How much has Blue Origin put into orbit? They've had as much money and more time than SpaceX, but aren't lead by Elon Musk, and how do they compare today?
I do read books and I acknowledge Musk was a bit more than just the money man in early SpaceX. Perhaps I am too cynical but I think many people are prone to cults of personality and over-estimating the impact of individuals. SpaceX is well beyond being a founder's plaything. If they were truly dependent on Musk's micro-management they would have a very serious bus problem for an organization of their size and importance.