[1]: https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-lists/elon-musk...
For a person who does and says so much, the need to egregiously pad a "top ten" list of "lies" like that is, IMHO, a compelling case for the inverse.
When Musk said “we can do this right now” he meant it’s possible with today’s technology, and that Tesla had probably run experiments to that effect already.
The hypothetical ability for a vehicle to act as a robotaxi would absolutely lift the value of the asset. That’s not even controversial. It’s a separate question whether the technology is ready to go in time for people to take advantage of it.
He made some good choices with Tesla. And some boneheaded ones. And SpaceX is a great example of success, because he made a really great decision there -- he hired Gwynne Shotwell. Then there's Twitter. Which is less about overt lies and more about gross incompetence. I think being a billionaire might have gone to his head and made him think he could only be successful.
https://www.motortrend.com/reviews/tesla-cybertruck-beast-vs...
My zero-evidence guess is that the Cybertruck team predicted the outcome in simulation, hyped everyone up about this as a visual demonstration, then spent tens of millions of dollars replicating the outcome in the real world, buying two Porsche 911s, renting a film crew etc. Except they couldn't replicate it in the real world. So instead of admitting the wasted money/time, they covered their asses and misled their boss.
There are many possible explanations for the discrepancy. The failure might have been in predicting the performance of that base model 911. Maybe the data they used was someone who was very slightly less urgent on the manual transmission.
The failure might have been a failure to predict the performance of their own product when it was still in the late stages of tuning. A last minute change to tyre compounds or stability control algorithms could have made enough of a difference in this very very close race.
It could be argued that in a fair comparison between cars, the stopwatch should begin when the driver slams the pedal, not when the car itself starts moving. The latter is how races are timed, but I'd argue that the former is more honest. Including the split-second delay of the ICE engine might make enough of a difference.
“___ is a pedo” ?
Like, the guy has done good shit (better than most), but he has certainly set his reputation on fire with many of his (at best “inaccurate”) tweets. At that point you gotta caveat praise lol.
Never heard that from people at Tesla or SpaceX.
Even this, you need to put asterisks on "created" because he spends so much time building out lies about the companies he runs/ran because the creation myth is so important. The amount of unforced errors behind his tenure at Paypal, a lot of it around trying to be taken as the guy who "made Paypal"... it's just very silly!
And I think ultimately in a place like HN, where there are supposedly a lot of "builder" types, when you hear every Musk company say "yeah the way we stay productive is to keep Musk out of things...." everyone's natural bias against bullshitters kick in!
I think it's hard to discount Tesla really pushing forward EVs. I think it's extremely easy to discount all of his other stuff if you're cynical (yes I include SpaceX in there, though it's easy for me because I think manned spaceflight, let alone "going to Mars", is extremely silly). But this stuff isn't really fungible...