Hyperloop > Neuralink > Self-Driving Cars > Robotaxi fleets > Personal Robots > Orbital Datacenters > [Insert next]
Never? For the sheer amount of moonshot bets he's doing, his track record would make any VC jealous. Zip2, PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX, Grok/xAI.
The EV revolution has always been something almost dystopic : Trillions of dollars spent in order to not have the slightest amount of quality of life improvement, if anything a worse quality of life because you buy an EV that you cannot use 24/7/365 whereas you can an ICE car for much less .
As soon as something kinda elegant and hopeful as far as collective quality of life improvement is concerned (AI/ChatGPT) came around.....the whole green/EV revolution rightfully went out the window
If Musk was this genius you guys make him to be at 50 and with all the capital he burned he should have at least one company that if you disappeared the world would look drastically different, like if you disappeared Microsoft or Apple or Exxon or Aramco or Amazon or IBM....the world would come to a screeching halt.
Disappear one of Musk companies and everything would be the same as he's always involved in these sort of aspirational companies which have this great vision always 5 years into the future that never materialize into anything tangible or that improves the quality of life like the company I mentioned earlier
This current announcement seems silly, though.
https://www.jalopnik.com/did-musk-propose-hyperloop-to-stop-...
Light rail, generally refers to urban rail, "trams".
> “Or did he just have an idea and blurt it out," I asked Vance. > "I'm 99.9-percent sure it's the latter," Vance tells me.
Also that to scapegoat Musk for killing the California train when California was perfectly able to kill it itself:
> Vance then brought up a valid point: "In all this time we've been talking about high-speed rail, there's still almost none that's built....
Once again pointing out Tesla has around 300 robotaxis running in 2 cities (Austin/SF).
Can we evaluate based on the stated goals, or why does the criteria keep shifting?
The New Deal happened with massive popular support because people did not like the Barons, and wanted to stop them and actually have a life worth living.
It only took like 30 years of suffering.
I guess props to scamming Compaq into making a large investment that didn't pan out. He did personally make money so I guess win for him.
>In an effort to woo investors, Elon Musk built a large casing around a standard computer to give the impression that Zip2 was powered by a supercomputer.
>PayPal
Huh? He didn't found Paypal, his company was acquired by Paypal. You might as well give him credit for eBay while you're at it. Paypal released their first digital wallet in 1999. They acquired x.com (and Musk) in 2000. Paypal itself was then acquired by eBay in 2002.
>Tesla
Investor, not founder.
>SpaceX
Yup, props here.
>Grok/xAI
Hasn't made a penny, no signs it had any path to profitability, which is why it was shoved into Space-X to cover his personal losses.
Elon Musk has already revolutionized three industries:
1. EVs: Before Tesla, no one thought electric cars could be a mass-market product. And even today, the Model 3 and Model Y are at the top of almost all sales lists.
2. Orbital Launch: No one expected Space X to succeed. What does a software guy know about real engineering? But today, re-usable rockets are the way of the future, and Space X is at least 5 to 10 years ahead of any other company.
3. Satellite Communications: Every single major military power is trying to deploy their own version of Starlink. Before Starlink, 50 satellites was considered a big constellation. Starlink has 8,000 satellites and they are literally launching hundreds every month.
I know it's impossible to prove a counter-factual, but I'm convinced that none of these three would have happened without Elon. No other Western car company has (even now) produced a profitable EV. No other space company has prices as low as Space X. No one even has the capability to build a Starlink competitor (not yet at least). Without Elon pushing these projects, they simply would not have happened or would have happened decades later (after China or someone else beat us to it).
Even his not-yet-successful projects are far beyond most other companies:
Boring Company has actually built tunnels and passengers are actually riding it. No one else is even trying.
Neuralink has actually helped patients.
Tesla FSD actually does work (I use it all the time), and even if Waymo is ahead, Tesla is easily in second place.
I 100% get the hatred for Elon Musk. His political positions are absolutely worth criticizing and I cringe most of the time he tweets. But to deny his business and engineering ability is just motivated reasoning.
Such illusions are ultimately self-defeating. The more opposed one is to Elon Musk (in business or politics) the more important it is to see his capabilities clearly.
Broadly, your point is still valid, though. Just a mild inaccuracy between the Gilded Age and the roaring 20s.
I like the idea that “he didn’t say that” and “he did say that but a different guy feels like he probably meant something else” are so obviously equivalent that skepticism of that notion constitutes a ‘conspiracy theory’.
That aside I like that the guy whose opinion should be treated as indisputable fact said that he thinks that there hasn’t been any high speed rail built globally in the past decade, which is not even remotely true. Obviously if he meant to say in the US he would have said so, since his next sentence was praise of Musk’s world-wide achievements.
I suppose it’s possible that Vance either doesn’t know anything about high speed rail or was in such a rush to extoll the virtues of the CEO of Tesla that he just sort of blurted something out to make Musk look good?
Looks to me they delivered on 2 of the 3
There is another way to view this. FSD plays fast and loose because they are constantly iterating. The culture at Musk co is that if you dont' keep pushing updates you are in trouble so do we really want to trust that each of his numerous updates are truly tested? This guy is a pathological liar after all. How many lawsuits are they dealing with now?
Supercruise only runs on pre mapped routes. If my life is on the line, I'd rather take the pre mapped routes and supercruise design is better at preventing people playing games to defeat the system (ex.shoving an orange in the steering wheel) so I know that others using the system on the road are following the system guidelines.
Supercruise may not do everything FSD does but it cuts out a large portion of the "fatigue" portion of driving and as a result can be highly trusted value add.
Boring Company bought an existing tunnel boring machine (TBM), and used it to dig a car tunnel. Their only “innovation” in terms of any cost savings is to dig smaller tunnels - which we already knew could be done (tunnel cost grows with diameter), and which we don’t do for good reasons (capacity, emergency egress).
The branding and marketing exercise was excellent though.
The full quote is “vaguely accurate but a disingenuous take”. And “Disingenuous” means “misleading/dishonest/untruthful/insincere/unfair”.
> Obviously if he meant to say in the US he would have said so
Come on, from the context it is clear that Vance means the US and specifically California. He also says “we” in the sentence “In all this time we've been talking about high-speed rail” and does not mean Chinese/Japanese/French having this discussion.
You’ve sort of just added “I feel like Vance meant something other than what he said” on top of Vance saying he felt like Musk meant something other than what he said. There isn’t a number of layers of “I feel…/he feels…” that you can pile onto a statement that will equal “he did not say the thing that he is quoted as having said”
Your contention is that by “accurate” he meant “inaccurate” and that he sees Elon Musk as being a global phenomenon and high speed rail as a… thing that’s local to the US? That is notable for its… absence?
Seems like “yeah that’s what he said but in my opinion you’re being mean to my friend” is more likely than a professional writer not knowing how to say “that’s not true”
It is patently clear what Musk meant, the guy isn’t famous for nuance. That aside I don’t find it difficult to picture the man that publicly claims that he personally elected the president thinking that he could sabotage a rail project. Now, I can’t know for sure that he believes that his Hyperloop pitch was responsible for the failure of the CA high speed rail project but if I had to make a bet about that…
And I have a Tesla and starlink and I'm quite happy with the level of autonomy the car has, so he has delivered on some level
But they failed to achieve the market share of Microsoft and not to mention the lackuster significance of EVs compared to Personal Computers and GUI
You can attack Tesla and Musk from 1000s different angles due to their shananigans except the one true badge of honor for a company and CEO:
Sherman Act / Anti Trust for 90+ % market share in a sector which ought to be competitive
I don't really buy that there's 250 in SF
You think the goal was to be the first through the glass take all the cuts that go with it and then pave the way for BYD ?
Tesla is no Apple, no Microsoft no Standard Oil. Valuations might make superficial people think that it , but it ain't
Again, tech company, startup, visionary...all these definitions are being used but in reality we are talking about a company founded back in 2001
Also I specifically stated that people who look at valuations are those who fall for narratives as opposed to looking look the impact that a company or a product has on their lives.
I remember life before Microsoft's Windows 95, I remember life before the iPhone, before Google, I remember life before Facebook, I remember life before Amazon became ubuquitous, before Uber....
It was a completely different world, much more friction , lots of quality of life wasted by that friction.
Life before and after Tesla? It's the same....hence they failed to leave a mark on society like the aforementioned companies and fell back on financial engineering , cult leadership, cult following and politics as well as hostile takeover of the US governemnt.
You speak about valuation but if we want to use dollars as a unit of measure then what impact did Tesla have as a company on the quality of life of citizens considering the amount of capital it allocated or rather incinirated ever since 2001? Very few companies enjoyed the right to spend so much, where's the quality of life dividend for citizens?
Where's the Windows 95, where's the CHatGPT which changes things and makes people question how they managed to live productive lives before it came about? Nowhere to be seen
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2024/11/22/elon-musk-...
When you burn through hundreds of billions of dollars in capital in a very public manner you don't get to pick the goal, the goal gets to pick you and it's the following, and it's for everybody not just Musk or Tesla:
"Absolute domination in a new sector of the economy which changes the life of citizens so much so that they cannot fathom going back to life before such new tech/product' introduction and subsequent intervention of Government for Sherman act purposes / Anti Trust"
None of that will ever come to fruition as it was the wrong crusade to begin with considering that the population never really deeply wanted it and so it is being rightfully abandoned.
Considering the cultish nature of Tesla I'll make the following comparision:
If Companies logos are the new cross/star of david/ insert religious symbol then Tesla failed in their crusade. The remains of the wrong crusade enterprise is being picked up by others who might or might not get some satisfaction and returns out if it.
not never, but xAI is not clear if successful, and others were bootstrapped 10 years ago, and not clear if they need mask at this point.