9 ms·

I feel people said the same thing about him for SpaceX and Tesla back when he was just the wacky PayPal guy. Remember SpaceX's first launch was in 2006 (before

I feel people said the same thing about him for SpaceX and Tesla back when he was just the wacky PayPal guy. Remember SpaceX's first launch was in 2006 (before the iPhone existed!) and it's only started getting really serious traction in the past 5 years. Elon's no stranger to things that don't have any "useful form" for well over a decade. I'm quite certain he's aware of the realistic timelines, and he sells a different story in the press for the sake of fundraising and PR. I think he's really got figured it out tbh - as long as he expects the technology to exist at some point, the fact that he's parked a big chunk of cash in the idea gives him an advantage. It's like he's reserved a spot for his company to exist when the tech exists. His team doesn't necessarily have to be the one actually making breakthrough innovations in order to be in a good position to reap the advantages of said innovations.

CommieBobDole 5y ago
That is a good point; Musk does sometimes announce things that essentially serve as a placeholder for "we're going to do this thing once the technology improves enough to make it feasible", and this is likely more of the same. But "useful humanoid robot" is way more forward-looking than anything else he's done this with; the closest thing would be the whole "full self-driving without LIDAR" thing, which keeps getting pushed back and is likely not possible with current technology. And building a humanoid robot that can actually do stuff is probably an order of magnitude more difficult than that. If I had to make a bet on when it was possible, I'd say 25 years. Maybe 10 if Tesla goes all-in on robots and spends tens of billions on it, Manhattan project style.
- OnlineGladiator 5y ago
  > If I had to make a bet on when it was possible, I'd say 25 years. Maybe 10 if Tesla goes all-in on robots and spends tens of billions on it, Manhattan project style. I have a decade of experience in robotics (including both humanoid robots and self-driving cars) and I think this is optimistic. Robotics is a wonderful field if you like to work on hard research problems. It is a terrible field if you're trying to invent a profitable product.
  - pontusrehula 5y ago
    I think industrial robotics is a well established and profitable field.
    - weego 5y ago
      Industrial robotics focuses on single task, highly specialised machines that have few constraints on form, size etc. This is not that. What tesla are conceptually pitching here (let's ignore that they'll deliver something that's pretty useless by comparison to what they're hoping you're assuming they mean) is a not-in-our-lifetimes leap in robotics in multiple ways
    - squarefoot 5y ago
      True, but humanoid robots have little to do with industrial applications. I'm not bashing Tesla or Musk in any way, but this seems more of a mix of PR and research. Robotics is indeed the future, there will be huge demand in a few years, and of course they want to keep a foot in that door, so they need a project which today allows them to say "we're doing robotics too", tomorrow could evolve in big "ooohhh!" and in the meantime let them build experience in the field. In due time all money spent in this field is going to return. In my opinion this robot will probably evolve either into a companion aid for lonely/ill people or maybe a future Tesla luxury car chaffeur, rather than doing any serious mechanical work. For most uses, today a wheeled/tracked platform with grabbers is still cheaper, stronger, better. The knowledge accumulated during the journey to get there however will represent the most valuable asset.
    - fragmede 5y ago
      that Tesla is in the process of building up expertise in. The Fremont, Nevada, China, and German Tesla factories are all filled to the brim with industrial robots.
    - _trampeltier 5y ago
      That 100% something else. Industrial robots are almost allways in a cage for safety. I know there are 'cobots' now, but I just never saw one, except in showcases. Industrial robots just do a fixed task and are dumber than a slice bread. Industrial robots are super heavy for what they can lift. Even they are very efficient with energy, they are still allways on main grid / no batteries. The huge task is anyway not to build a robot. The huge part is to make the robot (or any device) smarter than a slice bread.
- runawaybottle 5y ago
  But "useful humanoid robot" is way more forward-looking than anything else he's done this with I think flipping a giant rocket on its way back down to have it land upright sounded just as nutty as this awhile back, let alone a startup competing (successfully) against the military industrial complex. The entire car industry is also adopting electric. No, I think Musk has enough notable wins to get a pass here. It seems as though a lot of people (not the GP) really want to be apart of the narrative change on Musk, whatever humanity’s obsession is with building up and then destroying someone, followed with the redemption story. He really doesn’t have to prove anything anymore in my book.
  - piiswrong 5y ago
    But if you really think about it, flipping rocket is a trivial toy problem in simulation. But useful humanoid robot is very hard even in simulation. Just look at some of the SOTA control theory research. Their simulated robots looks stupid.
    - runawaybottle 5y ago
      Universal Healthcare is also a toy problem, but a true albatross concept beunricratically in the US. I say it’s a toy problem because we literally have copy and paste templates from most of the western world that we can use. Flipping that rocket and getting NASA contracts to go actually do it against Boeing/Lockheed/etc is not a toy problem. I don’t want to say it would never have happened without Spacex, but probably it would not have happened in our lifetime.
      - majewsky 5y ago
        Flipping rockets is a simpler problem in the sense that it the required technology already existed, there just wasn't anyone with enough incentive and resources to actually do it. Human-level robotics, on the other hand, is not a problem of missing incentive. For all I know about the field (as a casual observer), we are still several breakthroughs away from achieving this goal.
- FireBeyond 5y ago
  > If I had to make a bet on when it was possible, I'd say 25 years. Maybe 10 if Tesla goes all-in on robots and spends tens of billions on it, Manhattan project style. Except Musk says they'll be in beta in 2022. Hah.
  - natch 5y ago
    >Hah. Crappy beta can be done quickly and can lead to other things. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_9_prototypes https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_9_prototypes
- croddin 5y ago
  > But "useful humanoid robot" is way more forward-looking than anything else he's done this with Other aspirational goals he has set include a colony of a million people on Mars and a neural lace. I think a humanoid robot is less ambitious than either of these two.
  - johnla 5y ago
    I feel like with Tesla navigational brain technology, they can easily put together a bot that can mow lawns, sweep and mop floors. Pull out the garbage/bring cans back in. Security Sentry observe. Get mail. Walk dog. Deliver packages. I would pay for a bot that takes those chores off my hands.
  - hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago
    And, frankly speaking, it is a goal worth pursuing: not just per se, but for all technological advancements it would need to make in order to be successful.
  - marticode 5y ago
    We already have the technology to send people to Mars. We sent people on round trips to the moon 50 years ago, so a one way ticket to Mars now isn't really that hard. What we don't have is cost effective technology to send enough people and equipment for a permanent colony there. But at this point it's really just working on getting cost down (which Musk has done beautifully so far), we have a pretty good idea of how we'll get there. On the other hand we just do not have the technology for a full humanoid robot, neither now nor the near future. An AI that can do mundane tasks like ironing and folding clothes is way beyond our grasp, and then there are the issue of limbs and power too.
    - inglor_cz 5y ago
      "We sent people on round trips to the moon 50 years ago, so a one way ticket to Mars now isn't really that hard." IDK, man, life support systems for such a long trip are much more demanding than for a jaunt to Moon and back.
- notahacker 5y ago
  "Useful humanoid robot" is easily pared down to "robot toy with a vacuum cleaner attached, and some funny gestures on top of an Alexa-style Internet querying system". And a lot of promises that this time next year it'll be useful, or at least able to climb stairs. That level of technical functionality is already achievable, and the Musk brand solves the commercial problem of "but it doesn't really do very much"
mrjangles 5y ago
I like Musk, and I've been following his progress since 2011. I always thought he seemed very intelligent and seemed to really understand what he was doing. However I have to agree with the person you are replying to. There has been the sort of myth going around that making rockets is hard. It used to be hard... 50 years ago. That is literally the technology Musk has been using for the last 20 years: 50 year old technology (and yes that includes reusability). He has just been doing it cheaper, which there was no incentive for anyone to do before because it wasn't a free market. The reusable stuff is still misunderstood by most people too. Musk is losing money because of the reusability of his rockets. If he had never pursued reusability he would have made far, far more money from his launch business. Only now, after 10 years, are his reusable rockets just starting to break even with the cost of an expendable rocket (after reuse not before). He is pursuing reusability because it is his passion project, not because there is any money to be made from it. Since Musk, another 4 private companies have reached orbit, or will reach orbit this year (Firefly, Rocket Lab, Relativity Space, and Virgin Orbit). All of them took almost exactly 6 years from founding to orbit, just like Musk did. Furthermore, if you have been following closely, you would have seen the huge and humiliating mess ups he had with Tesla where he literally flushed billions and billions of dollars down the toilet. Any COO from another company would have had no problems setting up these manufacturing facilities without trouble, but Musk though he was smarter than everyone else and proved it was the other way around when it came to a competitive business like auto manufacturing. The man has vision, but this whole AI thing is just Musk getting lost in his own marketing.
- cryptoz 5y ago
  I'm no Musk fan but this > If he had never pursued reusability he would have made far, far more money from his launch business. Strikes me as short term thinking and not true, also. The plan is to sell tickets at $400,000 each to get to Mars. There doesn't seem to be any way to achieve that without reusability. The money to be made from founding the first Mars colony supplied with reusable rockets completely dwarfs some random launch provider on Earth. SpaceX never was and never will be a simple launch provider. If that is your lens then you are missing the company goals of 1M people living on Mars.
wallaBBB 5y ago
Hmmm one correction, SpaceX main driver is Gwynne and I doubt SpaceX would have been even close to what it is now if not for her. Musk is there more front face for the public. Tesla is his child, but so are many other (now obviously failed) projects.
- itsoktocry 5y ago
  >SpaceX main driver is Gwynne and I doubt SpaceX would have been even close to what it is now if not for her. Musk is there more front face for the public. A substantial portion of the Musk fanbase believe he's the one personally designing rockets and coding the software to land them.
  - skissane 5y ago
    I've never heard a single SpaceX fan suggest that Musk actually writes code any more. I think that is a bit of an exaggerated caricature. He knows how to do it, and he wrote a lot of code in the early days of Zip2, but since then, he has left the actual coding to others. (And, given he hasn't done it in anger in over 20 years, his software development skills are likely rather rusty. Plus, I’ve never heard any suggestions he has skills in avionics software development in particular.) I think he does actively involve himself in engineering-level discussions and decision-making, both at SpaceX and Tesla. Most CEOs don't do that, but some do – Bill Gates did that a lot when CEO of Microsoft – so it is not unprecedented. Designing something as complex as a car or a launch vehicle (or an operating system or an office suite) is a team effort, it is never going to be all on a single individual, and senior people are inevitably going to delegate a lot of the detailed analysis and design work to their subordinates – but a senior executive who actively involves themselves in engineering decisions can have a real impact on the outcome, for better or worse. He isn't formally trained as an engineer, but he has a degree in physics, and he is obviously a reasonably intelligent and very dedicated guy who has had years of access to some very experienced engineers, so the idea that he has learnt enough aerospace/automotive engineering to actually make a useful contribution as an engineering decision-maker isn't unbelievable. I'm a bit of a SpaceX fan myself, but I feel like there is a big disconnect between what the average SpaceX fan actually believes about SpaceX, and the caricatures that many SpaceX/Musk critics like to paint. (Of course, there may be the occasional SpaceX fan who takes it way too far, and for whom these caricatures actually become true, but I don't think the vast majority of us are actually like that.)
Cthulhu_ 5y ago
It's a moonshot, I think; he's got enough money personally (hundreds of billions) to fund an R&D lab similar to Boston Dynamics, and since it's under Tesla's wing, there is more than enough money to fund R&D into this. Of course, a lot of that money is all virtual, in owned stocks and market value.
loceng 5y ago
There's aiming for timeline and realistic timeline (4x expected, and perhaps 4x that too) to which he seems to shares the former; he may not consciously pay attention to the latter though and that may apply a needed pressure on himself to focus to make sure things are moving along as quickly as possible.
HWR_14 5y ago
> as long as he expects the technology to exist at some point, the fact that he's parked a big chunk of cash in the idea gives him an advantage. It also let's you point to two (major) successes while dismissing the Boring Company, Nuerolink, SolarCity and the Hyperloop, among others that went nowhere. Not that his sucess rate is anything to be embarrassed by, but his announcement alone doesn't lead to me expecting anything to ever be commercially available.
- panick21 5y ago
  > SolarCity SolarCity was not Musk lead company, he was just an investor. SolarCity was acquired and is part of Tesla and while they had to remove resources from Solar during the manufacturing difficulty and scaling difficulty the solar and home energy part of their business is still growing very well. I think its fair to say that going into solar was not as successful as Tesla hoped, but neither is it a failure. In the last year the growth of the business line has been finally showing promising growth. They are starting to work with more outside contractors and they have the cheapest solar product on the market. > Nuerolink The company still exists, they are working very hard on a very difficult problem. They are still adding people. They are working on something incredibly hard, has never been done before and will require a lengthy regulatory approval process. They did not announce a timeline for a product that they failed to hit. What exactly is your issue with the company? > Boring Company They are growing, have an engineering team working on the technology. Their commercial bids are very competitive. They have established test sights in California and Texas. They have made quite a few improvements already and in the publicly available data their commercial bids seem to be competitive. Apparently its a failure because the first product they ever did didn't meet the your standards or something. The costumer of that product seems to be happy and wants to extend the project. But who cares about happy costumers, what matters if how much people on HN like it. So how exactly is this a failure? I would be my ass that Boring Company valuation now is significantly higher then when it started. And I bet its already more successful then most startups. If that is your definition of 'going nowhere' I wish my projects would turn into companies of that size. > Hyperloop Maybe go back and actually read what was said at the time. Musk literally said he wasn't gone work on it. So your critic is that project he never said he was gone do didn't get done? That makes no sense. He literally said 'I posting this paper, maybe somebody wants to work on it, I have no time to do it'. If these are considered 'failures' now I really have done nothing in my life. I mean I haven't even created a single 100M+ company yet. Seems to me the only one that actually didn't go anywhere is the one that he said he wasn't going to do.

CommieBobDole 5y ago

That is a good point; Musk does sometimes announce things that essentially serve as a placeholder for "we're going to do this thing once the technology improves enough to make it feasible", and this is likely more of the same. But "useful humanoid robot" is way more forward-looking than anything else he's done this with; the closest thing would be the whole "full self-driving without LIDAR" thing, which keeps getting pushed back and is likely not possible with current technology. And building a humanoid robot that can actually do stuff is probably an order of magnitude more difficult than that. If I had to make a bet on when it was possible, I'd say 25 years. Maybe 10 if Tesla goes all-in on robots and spends tens of billions on it, Manhattan project style.

OnlineGladiator 5y ago
> If I had to make a bet on when it was possible, I'd say 25 years. Maybe 10 if Tesla goes all-in on robots and spends tens of billions on it, Manhattan project style. I have a decade of experience in robotics (including both humanoid robots and self-driving cars) and I think this is optimistic. Robotics is a wonderful field if you like to work on hard research problems. It is a terrible field if you're trying to invent a profitable product.
- pontusrehula 5y ago
  I think industrial robotics is a well established and profitable field.
  - weego 5y ago
    Industrial robotics focuses on single task, highly specialised machines that have few constraints on form, size etc. This is not that. What tesla are conceptually pitching here (let's ignore that they'll deliver something that's pretty useless by comparison to what they're hoping you're assuming they mean) is a not-in-our-lifetimes leap in robotics in multiple ways
  - squarefoot 5y ago
    True, but humanoid robots have little to do with industrial applications. I'm not bashing Tesla or Musk in any way, but this seems more of a mix of PR and research. Robotics is indeed the future, there will be huge demand in a few years, and of course they want to keep a foot in that door, so they need a project which today allows them to say "we're doing robotics too", tomorrow could evolve in big "ooohhh!" and in the meantime let them build experience in the field. In due time all money spent in this field is going to return. In my opinion this robot will probably evolve either into a companion aid for lonely/ill people or maybe a future Tesla luxury car chaffeur, rather than doing any serious mechanical work. For most uses, today a wheeled/tracked platform with grabbers is still cheaper, stronger, better. The knowledge accumulated during the journey to get there however will represent the most valuable asset.
  - fragmede 5y ago
    that Tesla is in the process of building up expertise in. The Fremont, Nevada, China, and German Tesla factories are all filled to the brim with industrial robots.
  - _trampeltier 5y ago
    That 100% something else. Industrial robots are almost allways in a cage for safety. I know there are 'cobots' now, but I just never saw one, except in showcases. Industrial robots just do a fixed task and are dumber than a slice bread. Industrial robots are super heavy for what they can lift. Even they are very efficient with energy, they are still allways on main grid / no batteries. The huge task is anyway not to build a robot. The huge part is to make the robot (or any device) smarter than a slice bread.
runawaybottle 5y ago
But "useful humanoid robot" is way more forward-looking than anything else he's done this with I think flipping a giant rocket on its way back down to have it land upright sounded just as nutty as this awhile back, let alone a startup competing (successfully) against the military industrial complex. The entire car industry is also adopting electric. No, I think Musk has enough notable wins to get a pass here. It seems as though a lot of people (not the GP) really want to be apart of the narrative change on Musk, whatever humanity’s obsession is with building up and then destroying someone, followed with the redemption story. He really doesn’t have to prove anything anymore in my book.
- piiswrong 5y ago
  But if you really think about it, flipping rocket is a trivial toy problem in simulation. But useful humanoid robot is very hard even in simulation. Just look at some of the SOTA control theory research. Their simulated robots looks stupid.
  - runawaybottle 5y ago
    Universal Healthcare is also a toy problem, but a true albatross concept beunricratically in the US. I say it’s a toy problem because we literally have copy and paste templates from most of the western world that we can use. Flipping that rocket and getting NASA contracts to go actually do it against Boeing/Lockheed/etc is not a toy problem. I don’t want to say it would never have happened without Spacex, but probably it would not have happened in our lifetime.
    - majewsky 5y ago
      Flipping rockets is a simpler problem in the sense that it the required technology already existed, there just wasn't anyone with enough incentive and resources to actually do it. Human-level robotics, on the other hand, is not a problem of missing incentive. For all I know about the field (as a casual observer), we are still several breakthroughs away from achieving this goal.
FireBeyond 5y ago
> If I had to make a bet on when it was possible, I'd say 25 years. Maybe 10 if Tesla goes all-in on robots and spends tens of billions on it, Manhattan project style. Except Musk says they'll be in beta in 2022. Hah.
- natch 5y ago
  >Hah. Crappy beta can be done quickly and can lead to other things. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_9_prototypes https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_9_prototypes
croddin 5y ago
> But "useful humanoid robot" is way more forward-looking than anything else he's done this with Other aspirational goals he has set include a colony of a million people on Mars and a neural lace. I think a humanoid robot is less ambitious than either of these two.
- johnla 5y ago
  I feel like with Tesla navigational brain technology, they can easily put together a bot that can mow lawns, sweep and mop floors. Pull out the garbage/bring cans back in. Security Sentry observe. Get mail. Walk dog. Deliver packages. I would pay for a bot that takes those chores off my hands.
- hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago
  And, frankly speaking, it is a goal worth pursuing: not just per se, but for all technological advancements it would need to make in order to be successful.
- marticode 5y ago
  We already have the technology to send people to Mars. We sent people on round trips to the moon 50 years ago, so a one way ticket to Mars now isn't really that hard. What we don't have is cost effective technology to send enough people and equipment for a permanent colony there. But at this point it's really just working on getting cost down (which Musk has done beautifully so far), we have a pretty good idea of how we'll get there. On the other hand we just do not have the technology for a full humanoid robot, neither now nor the near future. An AI that can do mundane tasks like ironing and folding clothes is way beyond our grasp, and then there are the issue of limbs and power too.
  - inglor_cz 5y ago
    "We sent people on round trips to the moon 50 years ago, so a one way ticket to Mars now isn't really that hard." IDK, man, life support systems for such a long trip are much more demanding than for a jaunt to Moon and back.
notahacker 5y ago
"Useful humanoid robot" is easily pared down to "robot toy with a vacuum cleaner attached, and some funny gestures on top of an Alexa-style Internet querying system". And a lot of promises that this time next year it'll be useful, or at least able to climb stairs. That level of technical functionality is already achievable, and the Musk brand solves the commercial problem of "but it doesn't really do very much"

mrjangles 5y ago

I like Musk, and I've been following his progress since 2011. I always thought he seemed very intelligent and seemed to really understand what he was doing. However I have to agree with the person you are replying to. There has been the sort of myth going around that making rockets is hard. It used to be hard... 50 years ago. That is literally the technology Musk has been using for the last 20 years: 50 year old technology (and yes that includes reusability). He has just been doing it cheaper, which there was no incentive for anyone to do before because it wasn't a free market. The reusable stuff is still misunderstood by most people too. Musk is losing money because of the reusability of his rockets. If he had never pursued reusability he would have made far, far more money from his launch business. Only now, after 10 years, are his reusable rockets just starting to break even with the cost of an expendable rocket (after reuse not before). He is pursuing reusability because it is his passion project, not because there is any money to be made from it. Since Musk, another 4 private companies have reached orbit, or will reach orbit this year (Firefly, Rocket Lab, Relativity Space, and Virgin Orbit). All of them took almost exactly 6 years from founding to orbit, just like Musk did. Furthermore, if you have been following closely, you would have seen the huge and humiliating mess ups he had with Tesla where he literally flushed billions and billions of dollars down the toilet. Any COO from another company would have had no problems setting up these manufacturing facilities without trouble, but Musk though he was smarter than everyone else and proved it was the other way around when it came to a competitive business like auto manufacturing. The man has vision, but this whole AI thing is just Musk getting lost in his own marketing.

cryptoz 5y ago
I'm no Musk fan but this > If he had never pursued reusability he would have made far, far more money from his launch business. Strikes me as short term thinking and not true, also. The plan is to sell tickets at $400,000 each to get to Mars. There doesn't seem to be any way to achieve that without reusability. The money to be made from founding the first Mars colony supplied with reusable rockets completely dwarfs some random launch provider on Earth. SpaceX never was and never will be a simple launch provider. If that is your lens then you are missing the company goals of 1M people living on Mars.

wallaBBB 5y ago

Hmmm one correction, SpaceX main driver is Gwynne and I doubt SpaceX would have been even close to what it is now if not for her. Musk is there more front face for the public. Tesla is his child, but so are many other (now obviously failed) projects.

itsoktocry 5y ago
>SpaceX main driver is Gwynne and I doubt SpaceX would have been even close to what it is now if not for her. Musk is there more front face for the public. A substantial portion of the Musk fanbase believe he's the one personally designing rockets and coding the software to land them.
- skissane 5y ago
  I've never heard a single SpaceX fan suggest that Musk actually writes code any more. I think that is a bit of an exaggerated caricature. He knows how to do it, and he wrote a lot of code in the early days of Zip2, but since then, he has left the actual coding to others. (And, given he hasn't done it in anger in over 20 years, his software development skills are likely rather rusty. Plus, I’ve never heard any suggestions he has skills in avionics software development in particular.) I think he does actively involve himself in engineering-level discussions and decision-making, both at SpaceX and Tesla. Most CEOs don't do that, but some do – Bill Gates did that a lot when CEO of Microsoft – so it is not unprecedented. Designing something as complex as a car or a launch vehicle (or an operating system or an office suite) is a team effort, it is never going to be all on a single individual, and senior people are inevitably going to delegate a lot of the detailed analysis and design work to their subordinates – but a senior executive who actively involves themselves in engineering decisions can have a real impact on the outcome, for better or worse. He isn't formally trained as an engineer, but he has a degree in physics, and he is obviously a reasonably intelligent and very dedicated guy who has had years of access to some very experienced engineers, so the idea that he has learnt enough aerospace/automotive engineering to actually make a useful contribution as an engineering decision-maker isn't unbelievable. I'm a bit of a SpaceX fan myself, but I feel like there is a big disconnect between what the average SpaceX fan actually believes about SpaceX, and the caricatures that many SpaceX/Musk critics like to paint. (Of course, there may be the occasional SpaceX fan who takes it way too far, and for whom these caricatures actually become true, but I don't think the vast majority of us are actually like that.)

Cthulhu_ 5y ago

It's a moonshot, I think; he's got enough money personally (hundreds of billions) to fund an R&D lab similar to Boston Dynamics, and since it's under Tesla's wing, there is more than enough money to fund R&D into this. Of course, a lot of that money is all virtual, in owned stocks and market value.

loceng 5y ago

There's aiming for timeline and realistic timeline (4x expected, and perhaps 4x that too) to which he seems to shares the former; he may not consciously pay attention to the latter though and that may apply a needed pressure on himself to focus to make sure things are moving along as quickly as possible.

HWR_14 5y ago

> as long as he expects the technology to exist at some point, the fact that he's parked a big chunk of cash in the idea gives him an advantage. It also let's you point to two (major) successes while dismissing the Boring Company, Nuerolink, SolarCity and the Hyperloop, among others that went nowhere. Not that his sucess rate is anything to be embarrassed by, but his announcement alone doesn't lead to me expecting anything to ever be commercially available.

panick21 5y ago
> SolarCity SolarCity was not Musk lead company, he was just an investor. SolarCity was acquired and is part of Tesla and while they had to remove resources from Solar during the manufacturing difficulty and scaling difficulty the solar and home energy part of their business is still growing very well. I think its fair to say that going into solar was not as successful as Tesla hoped, but neither is it a failure. In the last year the growth of the business line has been finally showing promising growth. They are starting to work with more outside contractors and they have the cheapest solar product on the market. > Nuerolink The company still exists, they are working very hard on a very difficult problem. They are still adding people. They are working on something incredibly hard, has never been done before and will require a lengthy regulatory approval process. They did not announce a timeline for a product that they failed to hit. What exactly is your issue with the company? > Boring Company They are growing, have an engineering team working on the technology. Their commercial bids are very competitive. They have established test sights in California and Texas. They have made quite a few improvements already and in the publicly available data their commercial bids seem to be competitive. Apparently its a failure because the first product they ever did didn't meet the your standards or something. The costumer of that product seems to be happy and wants to extend the project. But who cares about happy costumers, what matters if how much people on HN like it. So how exactly is this a failure? I would be my ass that Boring Company valuation now is significantly higher then when it started. And I bet its already more successful then most startups. If that is your definition of 'going nowhere' I wish my projects would turn into companies of that size. > Hyperloop Maybe go back and actually read what was said at the time. Musk literally said he wasn't gone work on it. So your critic is that project he never said he was gone do didn't get done? That makes no sense. He literally said 'I posting this paper, maybe somebody wants to work on it, I have no time to do it'. If these are considered 'failures' now I really have done nothing in my life. I mean I haven't even created a single 100M+ company yet. Seems to me the only one that actually didn't go anywhere is the one that he said he wasn't going to do.