What's Happening Inside the NIH and NSF

Re:What's Happening Inside the NIH and NSF by jhloa2 on Wednesday February 05, 2025 @12:28AM (#42944220)

So he fosters competence with his incompetence? Seems like it would work just as well without him except for marketing. I'm impressed with Tesla and SpaceX as a whole, but from what I've heard, he hasn't been heavily involved with day to day decisions for more than a decade. From my perspective, his role is to be a hype man that consistently over promises and under delivers.

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Re:What's Happening Inside the NIH and NSF by CamperBob2 on Thursday February 06, 2025 @12:23AM (#42959363)

Musk specializes at succeeding in fields where nobody else is seriously trying. He's never actually faced good old-fashioned market competition.

He's good at identifying ideas whose time has come, I'll give him that much credit. Ransacking the US Treasury wasn't on the radar, though, as far as I could see.

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Re:What's Happening Inside the NIH and NSF by ModernMech on Friday February 07, 2025 @12:09PM (#42974998)

"He's never actually faced good old-fashioned market competition."

https://waymo.com/blog/2024/03/scaling-waymo-one-safely-acro...

Note the date. Tesla still doesn't have a taxi.

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Re:What's Happening Inside the NIH and NSF by CamperBob2 on Friday February 07, 2025 @12:22PM (#42975120)

Waymo is doing good work but it's still very much a science-fair project, just another side hobby of Larry and Sergey.

Self-driving taxis will be a "market" someday, but not yet, and when they are, there is no reason to think Musk will be a force to be reckoned with. (Well, no reason other than the regulatory capture that he's no doubt putting into place now, that is.)

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Re:What's Happening Inside the NIH and NSF by fragmede on Friday February 07, 2025 @12:45PM (#42975374)

https://waymo.com/blog/2024/12/year-in-review-2024

from their blog that GP linked to, which says they gave 4 million rides in 2024, which seems like more than a "science faire side project", whatever that's supposed to mean.

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Re:What's Happening Inside the NIH and NSF by CamperBob2 on Saturday February 08, 2025 @02:04AM (#42981068)

It means it's not the least bit responsive to my assertion that Musk has never faced any serious market competition.

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Re:What's Happening Inside the NIH and NSF by ModernMech on Saturday February 08, 2025 @11:16PM (#42988401)

How so? I can give Waymo money and they send a driverless taxi to pick me up in SF. That's a market. Can't do the same for Tesla despite Musk saying they'd have robotaxis for years now, they're so far behind they're not even an option. How do you reconcile that with what you're saying here?

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Re:What's Happening Inside the NIH and NSF by CamperBob2 on Sunday February 09, 2025 @12:20AM (#42988664)

I can reconcile it by saying that I don't think he cares. He's being outcompeted in the self-driving taxi business, such as it is, but he has taken his eye off of that particular ball completely. People forget that he owns less than 20% of Tesla at this point.

If he does manage to outcompete Waymo, my guess is that it will be because he hosed them via regulatory capture somehow, thanks to his buddy in the White House. Or because Larry and Sergey got bored and folded their tent.

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