Most of them don’t, go to a local pub some time. Some people misunderstand that companies use puffery like “The Best” specifically because it doesn’t mean anything. But you will rarely find someone make material statements that aren’t true, if an advert mentions the EPA rated gas’s mileage it’s going to be close.

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.

Not the founder? maybe read Walter Isaacson's book.

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.

> Not the founder? maybe read Walter Isaacson's book.

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.

Tesla was nothing but two guys, a name, an office, and an idea when Musk invested $6.5 million into it. They had no technology, no car, no money, no nothing. That makes Musk a founder.

No, that makes Musk one of two series A investors.

> 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.

Your argument has nothing to do with what we're discussing, you're just piling unrelated talking points. That's a classic red herring fallacy.

How Musk approaches marketing is directly relevant here in terms of Tesla and SpaceX.

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.

Apple generally underpromises when it comes to perf per watt and battery usage, and then blows everything out of the water.

Regardless, that isn’t an argument worth making. Whataboutisms are silly.

Holding all companies to a similar standard isn’t whataboutism.

In my experience people shout “whataboutisms” when they’re trying to justify their own bias.