Even startups these days seem to be a case of too many chiefs, not enough Indians.
And he still would've been worth over 250 billion easily.
Instead he chose to buy the president and start "optimising" the government with AI.
Could he, though?
I mean, he might have the cash, but if you look at his history you don't see that much interest or respect for basic academic principles, or even any basic academic achievement whatsoever.
He conveys an image of someone who is mentally trapped in prepubescence, and who repeatedly does things that a prepubescent kid does to try to gather admiration. I meant who desperately tries to pass themselves off as elite gamers? How long will it take until he moves on to DJing? That's not someone who has any interest in founding education institutions.
The man does have an army of terminally online sycophants, which I now wonder whether they are astroturfed.
That statement is pointless. The critical factor is not money, it's willingness. You do not even need to be the world's richest man to put together a school. There are pro athletes with a fraction of the wealth that already do meaningful investments in education.
You should verify your claims
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/musk-physics-degree/
From the article:
> Musk's past statements about his educational background, however, have been, at best, imprecise. He has claimed on several occasions to have received a physics degree in 1995 — a claim that was never fully true but which may have aided Musk's early business career.
> The University of Pennsylvania considers Musk to be a graduate of both the economics department and the physics department.
And right above that, from the University of Pennsylvania:
> Elon Musk earned a B.A. in physics and a B.S. in economics (concentrations: finance and entrepreneurial management) from the University of Pennsylvania. The degrees were awarded on May 19, 1997.
>Rating: True
>Musk has on previous occasions claimed he received this degree in 1995, but the University of Pennsylvania says it was awarded in 1997.
What was the point of your comment?
The best thing he could do for Tesla would be to step aside.
> I called this Tesla stock crash months ago
TSLA is currently up 5% MoM despite really, really horrible earnings and outlook. The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent sometimes.
I think people care more about their own convenience. There’s nothing else in our market that’s even comparable. People talk a lot of shit and it wasn’t great to start but FSD is on a different level now, especially on newer cars like the new Model Y. Having a car that mostly drives itself is the best purchase I’ve ever made.
It doesn’t seem to be slowing down sales in Seattle. New Model Ys are everywhere here.
67% of Americans would not consider buying a Tesla, new poll says - https://electrek.co/2025/03/28/most-americans-would-not-cons... - March 28th, 2025
Tesla sales fall by 49% in Europe even as the electric vehicle market grows - https://apnews.com/article/tesla-sales-recall-trump-byd-b6f5... - March 25, 2025
Tesla is done in Germany: 94% say they won’t buy a Tesla car - https://electrek.co/2025/03/14/tesla-is-done-in-germany-94-s... - March 14th, 2025
Australian Tesla sales plummet as owners rush to distance themselves from Elon Musk -https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/mar/06/australia... - March 6th, 2025
(own several Teslas, won't buy another)
It is definitely slowing demand. You can see it in the Q1 numbers and the discounts on vehicles.
You can ask anyone who buys used EVs in Seattle. There is a glut of Tesla sellers and not many buyers.
Like it or not, your car says a lot about you. People bought Teslas because they liked what they said and now they are avoiding them because they don’t like it.
Elon had better put a bunch of quarters up his ass, considering how hard he played himself.
[1] (in dutch) https://www.nu.nl/nujij/6353652/klemgereden-hitlergroeten-en...
Good thing I live in a country where Europeans aren't mentally deranged.
a lot of Europeans remember the Nazis and didn't like the Nazi salute.
WW2 was memorable for a lot of people.
Even the ADL released a statement saying that it was obviously not a Nazi salute. People are actually delusional. Extremely childish and idiotic.
He does Nazi things, says Nazi things and funds Nazi things.
No, you did not. You saw a collection of Democrat politicians whose arms at one point were sticking out in the same position that arms stick out at the end of a Nazi salute. This happens all the time. I do it 3 days a week when making breakfast.
What Musk did was start with his arm down, rapidly raise it to his heart, and then forcefully thrust it out to the position usually shows in photographs of Hitler doing the salute. There are videos of Hitler doing that full hand to heart and then thrust gesture that almost exactly match Musk's gesture from start to finish.
When you track down the videos that the purported Democrat examples are taken from you will see that none of them did that. They were doing things like pointing, or waving to a crowd, or gesticulating while they talked, and in the midst of that their arms ended up in that position.
This is what it looks like when you are waving to crowd or gesturing and your arm goes out without it being identical to a Nazi salute: https://x.com/ExposingNV/status/1881647306724049116?t=CGKtg0...
This is what it looks like when what you are doing is exactly like a Nazi salute: https://x.com/BartoSitek/status/1882081868423860315?t=8F0hL-...
If you think these are exactly the same, seek optometrist help.
That's not a Nazi parade. The Nazis were defeated 80 years ago. They don't exist.
A lot of Jews support Elon Musk. Even the fucking ADL said it wasn't a Nazi salute.
Now show Hitler drinking a glass of water.
Drinking water = NAZI.
Funny you should ask but now's not the time to get into it.
Your comment breaches the guidelines.
Particularly this line:
> Get a grip on reality. Elon didn't cause any issues in EU policitcs.
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
Why wasn't it flagged? Thanks for confirming the bias and double standard selective enforcement on HN.
Be snarky against liberal views? Flagged for braking rules. Be snarky against unpopular views? Allowed and often upvoted.
As for bias: I've spent much of the past week and several hours today responding to allegations of bias in the opposite direction. I say to you what I've said to the others: we're not interested in ideology; we're interested in keeping HN a good place for curious conversations.
The term mentally deranged I used was at those committing acts of vandalism and terrorism against innocent people's private property, not against someone in the comments here. This is clear to anyone who can read at 8th grade level.
Am I wrong that such vandals are not mentally 100? Am I breaking HN rules with this assessment?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43476769
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43475596
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43447800
These are just a sample from the past few weeks but there are plenty more that cross the line and have been correctly flagged by the community for breaking the guidelines.
Some particular guidelines for you to pay attention to are:
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
But all the guidelines are important to follow and they apply equally to everyone, no matter their ideological position.
We need you take care to follow them in future if you want to keep commenting on Hacker News.
ok, you can get that with a Hyundai though.
higher-quality, too, yet the Tesla costs more.
He's an ambitious person. And AI enables a degree of surveillance state that we find it difficult to even begin to imagine. All the logistical difficulties of something like Orwell's 1984, of the Stasi having 1/3 of Berlin on the books as informants against the other 2/3, go away completely. We have more cameras than ever. Every person gets to enjoy the kind of focus that went into tracking down Luigi. DOGE has exfiltrated all our sensitive databases to servers that they control; Every 'Chinese Wall' intended to ensure some kind of separation of concerns has been broken down, almost certainly including various formally classified intelligence-gathering campaigns. You can't necessarily stuff that genie back in the bottle. If somebody wanted to be... not president, but authoritarian leader of a post-democracy, Musk would be well positioned technologically.
It wouldn't be inconceivable to set up an AI to do all the same sort of fraud & identity theft attacks against an individual that for-profit blackhats do, or that a Kiwifarms harassment campaign can do, without much of any actual staffing. Only DOGE starts out with your social security number, your tax records, your drivers' license, license plate reader records, web history, everything. That individual could be a Wall Street Journal editor who wrote something Musk dislikes, or ten thousand Redditors who are making fun of Teslas.
of course, that was his very explicit goal. Thiel backed Curtis Yarvin, who came up for the plan for this and called it RAGE. google it, it's all written down. they hoped to put in Bezos or Zuckerberg and have a more efficiently-run dictatorship replacing our democracy. because they didn't understand politics, they got the ketamine addict instead, who renamed RAGE to DOGE so he could also use it to power a crypto pump-and-dump.
*edit: and because it was never a realistic plan. because they didn't understand politics
To that dimension I would add ethics as well. It's very hard to justify working for the likes of Tesla when being mindful of the attitude the company and company representatives have with regards to basic issues ranging from workers rights to totalitarianism.
Places that understand that physical production cannot be abstracted forever will prevail.
I think the problem is more nuanced than that. The US was effectively "the world's managers", in the sense that their economic might, entrepreneur culture, and push for globalization resulted in a corporate structure where the ownership and executive levels were US whereas non-critical business domains reflected the local workforce, whether it was the US or not.
This setup worked great while the US dominated the world's economy and influenced their allies and trading partners to actively engage in globalization.
Now that Trump is pushing for isolationism, of course things change.
If I were to tell you a country over five years grew its GDP 5% in 1900, that would mean houses and roads and factories and mines and a whole range of things were built.
In 2020, 5% real GDP growth could be an increase in the value of various services. In fact, you might not need to change the physical world at all to achieve that growth.
Google, at its core, provides a service that helps you do physical things more quickly. If I need to replace the cruise control buttons on my car, I could go to the library and source a manual, or I could just search Google.
Facebook marketplace increases the efficiency of trading physical goods.
The Facebook feed is probably most akin to cigarettes.
Nowadays we're more in conflict, partly just because we can afford to be without risking immediate starvation. Billions get spent on swaying an election this way, more billions get spent on swaying it that way. Dollars spent in both directions count as GDP even though each one has another dollar on the other side pushing in the opposite direction. And it's not just elections, everywhere we're building moats instead of solving problems. It's a very busy way to not go anywhere.
We need to move from scalars to vectors--progress towards some goal--otherwise we're just patting ourselves on the back for working hard to no effect.
For example, we have 100+ drone startups in the United States. But our overall drone production capacity (hammers in Civ) hasn't actually increased. We just have 100 companies buying grey market from Vietnam and Indonesia, many of which came from China originally.
The way the system should work is if you want to do a drone startup, you need to build a drone factory. That's what the money is for.
If the startup fails, maybe the market leader buys the factory for cheap. This is how the automobile industry was in the United States - a bunch of those companies went bust, but the factories were often kept online by the winners.
“Smart People Should Build Things”
Oh, there's a "tax credit" to make it easier? Sounds like more paperwork & friction. No thanks!
That's one reason Tech is such an attactor. Low barrier to entry.
There are plenty of smart people who are highly passionate about things other than money. The problem is a large portion aren't at top name universities and doing don't have the connections. Problem is, they spent all their time learning their craft and not how to market their ideas.
I disagree that it's just because those jobs pay well. Look at what people are investing in and how it works. We throw tons of money at obviously bad ideas, obvious cons, and anyone that took a semester at Stanford. There are plenty of Bitcoin billionaires! There's tons who have made riches off the VR hype wave before that.
I agree that we put too much focus on finance and the like but I think more importantly we have a system where you can get ultra wealthy for producing vaporware. It's much easier to build hype than build a product. You still get people who become millionaires & billionaires by shipping things, but we created a system where we reward conmen. Ultimately, the con is easier than the actual job.
There's a lot of that tech can do but let's be honest, our industry has capitalized on the boom and bust cycle and accelerated it. We're not the only ones, but we're a big player and it's easier to hold our own community accountable than get others to change.
They could have strong-armed the states into it with a combination of funding the construction and the way they mandated the 21 drinking age: by threatening to withhold highway funds.
https://www.govtech.com/transportation/federal-funding-for-e...
I think this sort of statement should be revised. From an outsider's point of view, there is a political current within the US that pushes with a fundamentalist fervor the idea that state institutions cannot do any good or anything right. This becomes a self fulfilling prophecy when they elect candidates that push these ideals, which have a vested interest in sabotaging, derailing, and shutting down projects.
> Approval of funding does not necessarily mean the money has been dispersed. Only about $500 million of the $5 billion allotted for NEVI had been dispersed as of October, said Corey Harper, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at Carnegie Mellon University’s College of Engineering, who has conducted research into the NEVI program
Fast chargers as I understand are more taxing to the electric grid and so are not simply able to be placed just anywhere there is electricity. Additionally a source paper in the govtech.com article also emphasizes looking at coverage rather than number of chargers. That is wanting to have chargers spread out such a way that people can complete longer trips.
https://cyberswitching.com/understanding-grid-connections-dc...
Here's a true statistic:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2024/03/28/... ("Biden’s $7.5 billion investment in EV charging has only produced 7 stations in two years" (2024))
This is a story about a program not getting off the ground in two years and then being cancelled by the political opposition. Is two years too slow? You could certainly argue that.
But this really isn’t a story about government incompetence wasting billions of dollars on a handful or charging stations. Money was allocated, but it never had the chance to be spent.
That money was wasted when the project was cancelled, not before.
[1] https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/environment/nevi/resources/state-pl...
Yea let's give the federal government more power. That's going so well right now.
While useful parts of the federal goverment are destroyed, because they dont serve ultra rich.
Investing on a nation-wide infrastructure grid that fundamentally changes the nation's energy independence is hardly a reason to mindlessly parrot state rights cliches.
Read about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Highway_System
From an EU perspective the world as it has existed in the living memory is a world shaped by decisive US-actions. The way EVs have been approached were anything but that. Arguably neither did Germany, because of the way their politicians are entangled with the car manufacturers.
But if you sold the Spark EV for 20k today with like 120mi of range, it would be perfect and would satisfy all my needs 99% of the time. Even mine (13k all in) was great here in LA with ~60mi of range. I loved how small and easy to park it was without feeling cramped to me at all. If it had CarPlay I'd've said it was the perfect car haha.
It's a shame they haven't rebooted it yet as a pure EV. It's right there in the name!
Today, most of BYD's products use this technology. It's been improved to handle higher charging rates. Seems to work fine. Lithium-ion has better Wh/Kg, and it's still used in some high-end cars, mostly Teslas. BYD's approach has captured the low and medium priced markets.
BYD has announced that they plan first shipments of cars with solid state batteries (higher Wh/Kg) in 2027. Price will be high at first, and they will first appear in BYD's high-end cars. Like these.[3] BYD has the Yangwang U8, a big off-road SUV comparable to the Rivian, and the Yangwang U9, a "hypercar". Just to show that they can make them, probably.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dIt5z4wT9RE
[2] https://electrek.co/2025/02/17/byd-confirms-evs-all-solid-st...
I really did not expect to open this and have it be presented by Kryten! Fun surprise! :)
Fundamentally, IMO, EVs are such a simple concept mechanically that any company capable of building a conventional ICE vehicle can build an EV.
It's glib to say that - obviously there's a lot of unsaid complexity (battery back cooling, fitting into the frame, and so on), but the actual drivetrain component is just so simple. That EVs are still expensive is to me a sign that production hasn't ramped up yet. So long as production is limited EVs will remain a luxury product - but I can't imagine that's going to continue for all that much longer with an increasing backlog of used EVs on the market and decreasing battery prices.
Honda and Toyota weren't able to outcompete US manufacturers in the 1980s by offering higher performance vehicles but by delivering similar quality products at lower prices by making use of superior production techniques like Lean and JIT inventory management.
VW Group and Stellantis totally failed to compete with Chinese manufacturers and were driven out of the Chinese EV market almost entirely. Competition is extremely fierce.
>That EVs are still expensive
Look up what they cost in China.
>So long as production is limited EVs will remain a luxury product
Around 50% of new sales in China. Not "luxury" in any meaningful way.
The issue is that EVs do not differentiate themselves by power train. They differentiate themselves by battery and software.
That's because they plan to have a small number of huge factories to keep costs down.
But that means they need cheap ships, and can only sell to places with no car tariffs - which tends to be the countries without an auto industry.
Depending on what you are looking for they are WAY cheaper than comparable cars.
This matches reports from Tesla users. The cybertruck is specially prone to this sort of design problems.
The Cybertruck went with daisy chained PoE automotive Ethernet variant. The same cables delivering power to subcomponents handle data. Damage/problems in a single component can not only bring down the network but kill power to all the car's subsystems. It means less wiring in the Cybertruck (and lower production expense) at the cost of durability and fail-safety. Someone looked at TokenRing Ethernet and said "yes that is best".
I think it’s easy to look at the outputs of their industries and compare them extremely favorably to the outputs elsewhere, especially in EV.
But once you start comparing tariff adjusted pricing it gets much trickier much faster.
[1] https://www.businesstimes.com.sg/companies-markets/chinese-e...
Pretty sure they plan to disrupt any market
https://www.shs-conferences.org/articles/shsconf/pdf/2024/27...
Just 2018 to 2022, BYD received $5.9B. And that doesn't include all the indirect subsidies that went to suppliers like the battery manufacturers.
It's a part of Chinese government strategy of "build it and they will come". Massively subsidize select industries, dominate the market.
Which is why the EU has put high tariff's on the cars.
Also the many systemic, industry-wide factors discussed last week in
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43692677 ("America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back (molsonhart.com)" — 1010 comments)
I agree with the gist of that piece; focusing on specific engineering choices (important as they are) is missing the forest for a particularly interesting tree. Any American EV maker is heavily disadvantaged right now, no matter how clever they are.
Obviously an electric vehicle is so much simpler than one with a gasoline engine. We have seen it already with lawn mowers who shrank from huge tractors to nimble robots.
An in particular when you don't start from the Autobahn-eater type of cars.
When California and the EPA tried to legislate lower emissions 9 years into the future, the US automakers sued to block saying it was impossible. Japanese automakers were already selling vehicles that met those standards.
When they badly, badly screw up, they just get bailed out with public funds and then go on to pay execs tens of millions of dollars a year and fat bonuses. Guaranteed profits no matter what made them lazy and uncompetitive.
They’re all dying
When this happens, I think it's only fair that the bailed-out company becomes publicly owned. If I'm forced to invest in a company with my tax dollars, then I damn well better be treated as an investor. Where are my shares? Where are my dividends?
It appears that EV technology is new enough that it's Chinese companies that are the ones innovating, especially in battery technology.
This is because the LITERALLY CAN'T make money of a non premium product.
And for Tesla is just because Musk is stupid and went ALL-IN on self driving. They literally believe that the market will drop by 80% because of self driving. That's why the only build robotaxi and no model 2. Against the advice of basically everybody in Tesla leadership.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automobile_manufacture...
They had to in order to build the manufacturing capacity without literally bankrupting themselves. As GM has shown, once they had the expertise and manufacturing capabilities, they could quickly move downmarket. By all accounts GM's entry into the space has been a raging success, moving downmarket with the Equinox being available for as low as $27,500.
They obviously aren't to Tesla level sales numbers yet, but they're growing rapidly and I would not count them out of the fight.
https://insideevs.com/news/746177/general-motors-record-2024...
Two years ago, I decided I wanted an EV. I didn't want to spend a ton. There weren't many good options. I was disappointed by the Model 3. Ionic was promising. Ended up buying a Chevy Bolt EUV. I absolutely love it. The torque you get from even a modestly powerful electric vehicle is incredible, and one pedal driving is a real boon in city driving. Plus it's fun to drive past the gas station and just plug into the charger that Chevy paid to install at my house.
What went wrong is that 1) Tesla never made a low-end vehicle, despite announcements, and 2) all the other US manufacturers treated electric as a premium product, resulting in the overpowered electric Hummer 2 and F-150 pickups with high price tags. The only US electric vehicle with comparable prices in electric and gasoline versions is the Ford Transit.
BYD says that their strategy for now is to dominate in every country that does not have its own auto industry. Worry about the left-behind countries later.
BYD did it by 1) getting lithium-iron batteries to be cheaper, safer, and faster-charging, although heavier than lithium-ion, 2) integrating rear wheels, differential, axle, and motor into an "e-axle" unit that's the entire mechanical part of the power train, and 3) building really big auto plants in China.
Next step is to get solid state batteries into volume production, and build a new factory bigger than San Francisco.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_BYD_Auto_vehicles