> I don't understand how people keep falling for this. Every successful fraud has people it's tuned for. For example, consider how terribly written most spam i

> I don't understand how people keep falling for this. Every successful fraud has people it's tuned for. For example, consider how terribly written most spam is. That selects for people who are not fussy about writing. Conversely, a lot of the people doing high-end financial fraud is done by people who are very polished, very good at presenting the impression of success. Or some years back I knew of a US gang running the Pigeon Drop [1] on young East Asian women in a way that was tuned to take advantage of how they are often raised. Telsa's only has ~3% of the US car market, so they're definitely in the "fool some of the people all of the time" bucket. Musk's fan base seems to be early adopters and starry-eyed techno-utopians [2]. He's not selling transportation. He's selling a dream. They don't care that experts can spot him as a liar [3] because listening to experts would, like, totally harsh their mellow. Although it's much closer to legal fraud, I don't think that's otherwise hugely different than how many cars are marketed. E.g., all of the people who are buying associations of wealth when they sign up for a BMW they can't afford. Or the ocean of people buying rugged, cowboy-associated vehicles that never use them for anything more challenging than suburban cul de sacs. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigeon_drop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigeon_drop [2] https://www.theverge.com/2018/6/26/17505744/elon-musk-fans-tesla-spacex-fandom https://www.theverge.com/2018/6/26/17505744/elon-musk-fans-t... [3] e.g.: https://twitter.com/kaifulee/status/1126238951960993792 https://twitter.com/kaifulee/status/1126238951960993792