They had 2 dozen vehicles with no steering wheels taking attendees around the venue. The bar was staffed by Optimus robots. “Basically a website”?
To quote a participant[0]:
> After over 10 years of Full Self-Driving development, @Tesla is limited to a 20-30 acre geofenced 5mph ride on a preprogrammed, premapped and heavily rehearsed route with no traffic and no pedestrians.
Real funny seeing a bunch of web devs on HN talk shit about Tesla's engineers too lmao
How long did it take to get to that 90% ? AFAIK they first mentioned FSD ~2016(Self-driving itself even earlier).
As the last 20% of work are often 80% of the effort we can estimate that those remaining 10 % take ~ 40% of the time. They've been at it for ~8 years , which gives an expected release of ~ 2029.
We'll see what Waymo and other competition has until then.
a suicidal teenager
Followed by Hofstadter's law: "It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hofstadter%27s_law
It's not "talk shit about Tesla's engineers", it's just a very hard problem to solve. It's easy to get it "most of the time" but extremely difficult to finish it. It's obvious it will take decades, not years to get us there. Whereas Musk insists he will solve it "this year", every year from 2014.
The only reasons Tesla could be valued differently are FSD and Robotics, which Musk and Tesla-friendly analysts are heavily pushing. Since Musk has made massive loans against his Tesla stake you can expect that he will keep highlighting those narratives as well. A revaluation of the stock to sane levels would certainly cause him some financial difficulties.
betcha in 10 years time we'll learn about all of the ITAR violations and other shady behavior
Don't have to wait 10 years if you read the WikiLeaks above.
Maybe a bit of that but investors are more buying into Musk's past track record with Tesla and SpaceX which has been pretty good really.
- I believe he can revolutionize auto manufacturing and disrupt a 100 year old industry replacing fossil-fuel burning dinosaurs with clean electric vehicles that outperform them and that appeal to the general public
- I believe he can allow quadrapelegics to interact with the world in ways never thought possible
- I believe he can, to a great degree, restore free speech on social media even if it is messy and imperfect at times
- I believe that innovation is hard and just because he boldly claims he is going to Mars or make cars drive themselves - and hasn’t done it yet, is no reason to discount the possibility that he might actually pull it off one day
What he has done is throw money at people who can. But now he has started micromanaging things because he believes he knows best.
He is a total buffoon.
Management is a real skill. Salesmanship is also a real skill. I may not approve of the showboating, but drumming up enthusiasm for a future that most consider to be fantasy, was a necessary (though not sufficient) part of building an electric car company in an era when most people thought hydrogen was the future and that "electric car" meant "a milk float" and, if they had memories of any real personal electric vehicle, those memories would have been of the failure of the Sinclair C5:
It would have made more sense to sell Fischer-Tropsch synthesized carbon fuel from purpose-grown crops, at a mere 3x the current production price of fossil carbon fuels, using the existing infrastructure for distribution into existing vehicles.
..Okay?
Calling Elon Musk an ’idiot’ in a non-ironic way tells us you’re not being objective and contributing to a rational discussion.
> What he has done is throw money at people who can.
Funny then that countless other space and car startups had far more money and were far less successful. And many of those were far less micromanaged.
BlueOrigin for example literally got 100x as much money from its owner as SpaceX did.
> But now he has started micromanaging things because he believes he knows best.
This is just factually inaccurate, he has been micromanaging since the beginning. Literally everything ever said about him was that.
Look we get it, you don't like him as a person, but these statement just make you seem dumb and uninformed.
Most of the passionate (embittered? salty? flavourless?) critiques of Elon always sound like a confession: His critics can't explain why he is successful, why his companies are successful, nor why he is wealthy. When they attempt an explanation, it's less an explanation and more a dismissal: luck, other people, teams, theft, subsidies, corruption, "the system is broken!", a technoaccelerationist cabal secretly pulling the levers of power.
But, fundamentally, the question whose answer eludes the majority of humans especially Elon's critics is: Why am I not as wealthy and relevant as Elon yet I'm obviously smarter and more ethical than he is? (Their implicit answer is that "life is unfair and doesn't reward the best people.")
Because if any of his critics actually had a meaningful critique that corresponds to reality, they would simply build better products and companies, become billionaires themselves and exemplify rather than pontificate about a better mode of billionaire behaviour and grandeur of vision.
I wonder if the critics of Musk's "fans" realize that deflecting all criticism with "they're just Musk fans, bro" says more about their own anemic ability to imagine the legitimacy of another perspective, their utter lack of humility and complete poverty of intellectual honesty, than about the so-called fans they're flaccidly trying to discredit?
Thing is, the illusion is fading, his previously "inscrutable" politics are on his sleeve, and you can't just pretend he's not a complete liability for any company because of his irrational, and frankly childish, behaviour.
> Made electric cars commonplace sooner than I thought with the Model S
You mean financing and leading the largest EV maker in the world and fundamentally changing a 100 year old industry.
Car industry has been considered for a long time a incredibly hard place to get into for a startup. Most new companies happened when industrial powers rose and supported local companies.
There are decades of failed car companies. And at the same time as Tesla, there were other companies who promised EV revolutions and failed.
People point to the Model S, but the Model 3 was actually just as or more important. When the Model 3 showed profitability ever car company in the world massively increased their investment in EV, before that many companies were pretending and doing research. For years the story was EV can't be profitable below 50k and you can't build them at volume.
> financed SpaceX's doubtlessly awesome progress
If with 'finacned' you mean founded and lead the largest SpaceX company in the world that has revolutionized the whole space industry and is the biggest rocket company and the biggest sat company that can also fly people to space and build the biggest rocket in the history of humanity.
SpaceX Starlink literally fundamentally changed the largest war in Europe since WW2.
But I guess all he did is 'financed progress'. You got to be fucking kidding me.
> and you can't just pretend he's not a complete liability
Can you spell out in actual real terms what this means? SpaceX is going from success to success and has been for 25 years now. Tesla is still a large company doing pretty well. Both companies are much bigger and much more important and powerful then they were 4 years ago.
In the real world, customers don't care about 'childish' behavior. And claiming he is irrational when his companies mostly act rationally on net (no companies is perfect and never makes errors) also don't really work very well.
At the very least, if you are going to impartially assess his business accomplishments, you should completely disregard his political views when making that assessment. Otherwise you're giving him a dishonest business leadership assessment as a ploy to punish him for his politics.
https://www.reddit.com/r/WikiLeaks/comments/1fy10k1/comment/...
That's the reason he was able to get this rich with SpaceX and not stall sooner — most of the other space companies were (and in the west, still are) busy scratching backs rather than developing successful products.
It's possible "which Musk didn't found" is doing some heavy lifting in your statement above.
ARPA gave us TCP/IP, but MS, Google, telcos, etc. gave us the modern internet and the tools to use it
> I believe he can, to a great degree, restore free speech on social media even if it is messy and imperfect at times
I strongly disagree with this.
Even if I ignore the proxy of all the investors writing off their buy-out loans by 75%, even if I ignore that when people link me to random threads I can only see the specific one linked and not any reply because of an invisible paywall^w account-wall, even if I ignore that loading a random tweet now often takes 26 seconds or more (yes, I did just record my screen to get that number), even if I ignore that undesirable stories can be buried by an avalanche of alternative narratives and not just by censoring the truth…
There's still the problem of Musk intervening politically in ways that, although totally legal, are exactly the kind of thing he was complaining about before the takeover: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_suspensions
I'd like someone, eg Musk, to define "free speech". Start with some of those "first principles" he likes so much.
Then, per "theory vs reality" cliché, I'd like someone, eg Musk, to explain or demonstrate or larp or interpretative dance what "free speech" looks like in practice. Maybe even point to an existing example.
For bonus credit:
- explain relationship between "free speech" and news feeds (algorithmic hate machines)
- explain operation of "free speech" multinationally
- explain how to balance "free speech" and moderation
- enumerate the tradeoffs of, downsides due to, and consequences of "free speech"
For goodness sake, ElonJet was banned and you can’t even say the word “cisgender” on the platform. How delusional are you?
X is like a textbook case of why total autocracy isn’t actually good management practice. Musk has become the Henry VIII of social media.
Before, people were being banned for using "him" instead of "her" to describe biological males who self-identified as women. People were secretly de-amplified for criticizing the government policy of lockdowns. It was censorship on a whole different magnitude.
Two wrongs don’t make a right. Either you’re a “free speech absolutist” or you’re just a lying charlatan. Elon is clearly the latter, the evidence is right in front of your eyes and you choose to make excuses.
ElonJet is posting publicly available information and isn’t banned on other platforms. Something coming with a warning is the same as restricting speech.
Placing a warning is generally not considered a restriction on free speech but rather a tool to inform or protect audiences.
In contrast, restricting free speech involves preventing someone from expressing their views or censoring content outright. Warnings are typically seen as a way to balance free expression with the responsibility to inform audiences.
You mean like suing people for saying true things, and encouraging the government to criminally investigate for people for saying the same? Because that is exactly what Musk has done in the past year.
I’m simply saying that it is false to claim that attaching a warning to something is restricting free speech.
Two good examples are the government warning on tobacco product or cancer-causing warnings in public spaces.
These are warnings and do not constitute restriction of free speech.
But if you want to get really technical then this isn't even about "free speech". A platform restricting speech has nothing to do with "free speech" as it is defined in the US constitution. That's all about governments creating laws that punish people for certain speech.
But hey, we're in a world where Elon spouts nonsense about being all about "free speech" so the world has lost that meaning anyway.
So this is just yet more nonsense.
People are only being banned for impersonation and live geotracking. In the previous Twitter, you were banned, shadow-banned, de-amplified, etc, if you expressed views that the political left disagreed with.
You want to justify and downplay the latter my presenting Musk as equally villainous. It's disingenuous mental gymnastics to advance your censorious and authoritarian agenda. Getting Twitter back to being censored is what motivates the incessant attacks on Musk.
You're okay with the previous authoritarianism that was imposed that's why you'd prefer a return to the previous setup. If you believed in political neutrality and Free Speech, you would be hardly annoyed by Musk not being as committee to Free Speech as he claims, while he reverses what had been an overwhelming censorship program.
Elon knows Trump is a transactional person and as long as he supports Trump, he can get the necessary governmental treatment his companies need to survive (tax credits, Chinese EV tariffs, some sort of asinine Mars mission).
Western governments have discovered the Chinese plan to decimate western manufacturing by subsidizing it at over 10 X the rate required and seen in the west.
Vehicles matter because they are a means for war machine production.
It's basically just a website at the moment with bunch of 3D renders which you too could get done from a web shop.
Tesla has nothing new to offer and competition is catching up, EV adoption slowing down and such.
If I had, I would gradually drop Tesla stock because it's going to go downhill if not rock bottom from here.