Elon of 2012 was a dramatically different person than Elon of 2025. And like I pointed out he is talent constrained. Elon is not developing camera vision. He is seeking and hiring talented software people to do it. In 2012 Elon was celebrated and going to work for Tesla was a prestigious career. Something you could flex.

Today you would be embarrassed to mention you took at job at Tesla, especially when so many other big name prestigious companies will pay the same or more for those same skills Elon desperately needs.

I doubt that factors into most people’s decisions. If anything, aerospace and automotive engineers tend to lean centrist to conservative: https://par.nsf.gov/servlets/purl/10529569 (Table 5). And aerospace is disproportionately white men compared to other engineering fields.

Additionally, my observation is that reactions to Musk are heavily influenced by individual levels of empathy, and “people focused versus systems focused” thinking. In my experience aerospace engineers are pretty low empathy and low people focus. When I got my degree in aerospace engineering in the early aughts—before SpaceX and the reboot of commercial aerospace—the most exciting job to look forward to was designing missiles for Raytheon and stuff like that. When I worked for a military contractor, the hypothetical scenarios always involved stuff like “so we just overthrew Iraq’s government, and now we need radio uplinks to our UAVs so we can blow up terrorists.” Nobody caught feelings over that stuff. I doubt many of these folks care about Elon’s tweets.

It's neither aerospace nor automotive engineers that are solving camera-only self driving. There is extreme demand for AI engineers right now, and the people capable of solving a problem like that have pick-of-the-litter access to any AI lab they want.

I would imagine math-focused people are even lower in empathy/people focus. Heck, I can imagine it being a recruiting advantage to tout that, at xAI, engineers won't be hamstrung by liberal arts majors telling them to make the results politically correct. After all, xAI seems to have brought Grok to a competitive state quite quickly.

OTOH, we've seen open-source projects like Nix and arguably Rust and arguably workplaces like Google and Twitter taken over by Leftist ideologues (although I would guess that the Leftists are no longer in control of the middle 2 and of course definitely not of the last one).

> And he's not the only one who went the camera route--GM Super Cruise, Subaru Eyesight, etc., work that way as well.

Those all include radar.

> There is still no mass-produced car with LIDAR.

There are several from Chinese car makers.