7 ms·

How times have changed since Tesla was untouchable here. What happened and why does everyone talk like they've always hated Tesla (and Elon)? Surely it's mostly

by Kiro 4y ago

How times have changed since Tesla was untouchable here. What happened and why does everyone talk like they've always hated Tesla (and Elon)? Surely it's mostly the same crowd as when Tesla was loved and Elon a superstar.

drno123 4y ago
Musk bought Twitter and fired 50% od the staff without Twitter crashing, which exposed how overstaffed and overpayed thise guys were
- petee 4y ago
  Or just how well they designed it
  - mikeyouse 4y ago
    Imagine thinking that firing 50% of the staff that built an enormously complicated piece of software, and having the service stay up and running means that the people who built it were overpaid or overstaffed.
    - BaseballPhysics 4y ago
      "We don't need firefighters. No one has died in a fire in years!"
      - drstewart 4y ago
        "We don't need the TSA. No one has died in a hijacking in years!"
    - drstewart 4y ago
      And if it did fall over you'd be saying the same exact thing. So by your own logic, it's impossible for a company to be overpaid or overstaffed.
      - mikeyouse 4y ago
        It’s almost like it’s not possible to judge the necessity or required quantity of software engineers from outside the company!
- sgjohnson 4y ago
  He could have fired 100% and Twitter wouldn’t crash.
- BaseballPhysics 4y ago
  > which exposed how overstaffed and overpayed thise guys were Systems don't fail overnight, and Twitter has definitely been exhibiting odd behaviors lately. It's just a bit early for a victory lap.
  - throwaway894345 4y ago
    Twitter hasn’t been exhibiting “odd behavior” for years. Systems don’t fail overnights, but I would expect some signal to emerge from the noise by now.
- dinkumthinkum 4y ago
  I don’t know that they were overpaid. I also don’t know that all the people fired had to deal with day-to-day uptime operations. If they did, then they probably were over-staffed but probably they were not and I think we all know that. Now, it seeend quite likely they were over staffed to an extent but I don’t know about this idea that “Twitter is still up so those people were useless.” Also, Musk fired some people for saying stupid things about their boss on his platform, that is just fair play. I don’t see why people like NYT are up in arms about it (well, I do). However, read Musk’s Tweets from November. He was behaving like a little child trolling on the Internet.
- croes 4y ago
  Too soon to say that. Even if they are understaffed now it wouldn't immediately collapse.
  - 93po 4y ago
    Performance has literally improved since the layoffs.
- watwut 4y ago
  He is selling waaay less ads and way cheaper then used to be. And while it has many reasons, him firing people who were actually selling those ads is one of them.
scaramanga 4y ago
I think a lot of people got caught up in a sort of mass mania induced by media portrayals of a billionaire genius with a mission to change the world for the better. Recent events have just given people permission to climb down from the collective psychosis.
- Kiro 4y ago
  I think it's dangerous to presume that the current narrative is clean from delusion and that only the previous discourse was a psychosis.
marvin 4y ago
Tesla has been hated on HN for years. Current sentiment is just a continuation of that long trend. I've kept a record of HN comment threads that keelhaul Tesla and Musk since around 2015 or so. I really believed in the company's mission and execution throughout those years (and still do), and wanted to keep a record of the very widespread opposing view. This in order to document it in case I was wrong, or in case I was right and someone claimed in retrospect that success was obvious and inevitable. I don't believe there has been a material change in sentiment.
- throwaway894345 4y ago
  I definitely perceive a shift in some people who were very pro-EV, pro-Tesla due to environmental concerns but became very anti-EV, anti-Tesla as it became apparent that Musk was not part of their political affiliation.
  - lolinder 4y ago
    In RL or on HN? If on HN, you can be pro-EV and anti-Tesla (which is where I fall), so don't mistake a commenter taking that position with someone changing their mind.
    - throwaway894345 4y ago
      On social media. Agreed that you can be pro-EV and anti-Tesla; I am remarking about an observed change in tone from pro-EV, pro-Tesla to anti-EV, anti-Tesla.
h2odragon 4y ago
Musk spoke political heresy.
- meepmorp 4y ago
  Musk has been a jackass for years, and many of us saw through the facade well before now.
- cactusplant7374 4y ago
  Which is obviously a mistake if you’re a TSLA shareholder. Not knowing the political opinions of the CEO of your favorite company facilitates revenue.
lolinder 4y ago
HN is a forum with a lot of people in it with different opinions. Speaking as one of those who's always disliked Tesla and been turned off by Musk, one explanation is that the skeptics now feel more empowered to speak out than they did before. Also, depending on how far back you're talking, you may be overestimating how much unadulterated love there was for it before: I've been following conversations on Tesla here for years, and plenty of other vocal skeptics have been here for as long as I have.
- notahacker 4y ago
  I think the biggest shift is less the emergence of skepticism which was always there, and more that the people who would previously counter that Elon had always shown impeccable judgement and laser focus on big decisions, that we should trust him the promised FSD would be delivered soon or that he truly believed in the cause of free speech and would completely transform social media for the better tend to have gone a bit quiet.
  - lolinder 4y ago
    Yes, I can see that! It's not that the skeptics weren't there before, it's that the Elon defenders are less willing to speak up than they were.
    - scaramanga 4y ago
      And the experience is like stepping out of an elevator that a football team had farted in and you'd been holding your breath for a decade. Let's enjoy this moment while it while it lasts. We'll back on another hype train of tech "making the world a better place" before you know it :)
hericium 4y ago
Did anything change? I was downvoted for calling out Musk as dangerous (...) unstable and unethical sociopath with so called "self driving" car a year ago[1] just as I was downvoted for pointinug out FSD is a myth just one day ago[2]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29750109 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29750109 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34105214 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34105214
- scaramanga 4y ago
  Bootlickers gonna lick. There's a reason tech is seen as the job that's "too plum to unionize." We are the most aligned with the beliefs and values of management and capital. We wouldn't have our nice jobs if we weren't. All that's happened here is that one paranoid delusional billionaire has a reactionary conspiracy theory that the most elite bootlicking workers in the economy are secretly all trotskyites in league with the woke marxist antifa at Ford and GM and other major advertisers etc.. The collateral damage of this has caused mass cognitive dissonance for people in tech who are either going to realise that maybe robber barons don't have our best interests at heart (shock!) or just double down on the bootlicking to see if that makes papa stop hitting us and love us again.
BaseballPhysics 4y ago
It might not be. I've never liked Elon, a view that was truly cemented during the "pedo guy" incident. In the past that meant I just ignored fawning articles or comment threads about this modern "Tony Stark" as I knew any critical comments would result in a pile-on from his supporters. Conversely, herds are gonna herd, and Musk fans are probably a lot less vocal these days compared to the days of peak Elon hero worship.
sethd 4y ago
It looks like my first public comment on Musk/Tesla was in February 2021 [0]. I remember getting hooked on the FSD fraud story sometime in 2019 and seeing many negative Musk/Tesla comments since that time. There’s always been some fanatic Musk supporters leaping to defend/apologize, but at least to me, it feels like the skepticism has been strong here for quite some time. [0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26065592 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26065592
jackmott 4y ago
[dead]
rvz 4y ago
It seems that recently, it is become trendy to hate Elon Musk because of the news where as I'm only critiquing FSD as I did a year ago against the fanatics [0], since that is obviously full of snake oil and false promises and a beta 'safety critical' product deployed to hundreds of thousands of drivers on the road. I don't see that level of deception yet with SpaceX, Starlink or Neuralink. Tesla cars themselves are also fine until you're talking about FSD which that is the problem and the scam that puts the lives of other drivers on the road at risk. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28000436 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28000436
- foobiekr 4y ago
  You don’t see that level of deception with Neuralink, which (he claims) will cure (in the near term) Parkinson’s, tinnitus, paralysis, etc.?
- cactusplant7374 4y ago
  Neuralink experiments are based on old experiments and nothing new. We have to ask ourselves why didn’t the research lab that originally did those experiments move forward with them? But the idea that this has any implications for healthy people is ludicrous. They can read a thousand neurons close to the brain’s surface. So? The understanding of the brain is incredibly limited and Musk won’t be able to access much of it anyway.
93po 4y ago
There are a lot of profit incentives for corporate media and established players in a lot of industries to smear to Elon. This results in a ton of bad media coverage, and people are a product of the information they consume. Over time this style of coverage embeds itself in people's minds, and we see what we're seeing now: posters that have never met elon, never spoke to him, and never worked with him stating ridiculous opinions about his motivations, his health, and mental status as fact.
- c-cube 4y ago
  He's on display on Twitter every day all day. No need for conspiratorial thinking, people can make their opinions based on years of lying about FSD, being an absolute asshole to (former) Twitter employees, and generally flailing around since he bought Twitter. What does meeting the guy in person have to do with anything?

by Kiro 4y ago

drno123 4y ago

Musk bought Twitter and fired 50% od the staff without Twitter crashing, which exposed how overstaffed and overpayed thise guys were

petee 4y ago
Or just how well they designed it
- mikeyouse 4y ago
  Imagine thinking that firing 50% of the staff that built an enormously complicated piece of software, and having the service stay up and running means that the people who built it were overpaid or overstaffed.
  - BaseballPhysics 4y ago
    "We don't need firefighters. No one has died in a fire in years!"
    - drstewart 4y ago
      "We don't need the TSA. No one has died in a hijacking in years!"
  - drstewart 4y ago
    And if it did fall over you'd be saying the same exact thing. So by your own logic, it's impossible for a company to be overpaid or overstaffed.
    - mikeyouse 4y ago
      It’s almost like it’s not possible to judge the necessity or required quantity of software engineers from outside the company!
sgjohnson 4y ago
He could have fired 100% and Twitter wouldn’t crash.
BaseballPhysics 4y ago
> which exposed how overstaffed and overpayed thise guys were Systems don't fail overnight, and Twitter has definitely been exhibiting odd behaviors lately. It's just a bit early for a victory lap.
- throwaway894345 4y ago
  Twitter hasn’t been exhibiting “odd behavior” for years. Systems don’t fail overnights, but I would expect some signal to emerge from the noise by now.
dinkumthinkum 4y ago
I don’t know that they were overpaid. I also don’t know that all the people fired had to deal with day-to-day uptime operations. If they did, then they probably were over-staffed but probably they were not and I think we all know that. Now, it seeend quite likely they were over staffed to an extent but I don’t know about this idea that “Twitter is still up so those people were useless.” Also, Musk fired some people for saying stupid things about their boss on his platform, that is just fair play. I don’t see why people like NYT are up in arms about it (well, I do). However, read Musk’s Tweets from November. He was behaving like a little child trolling on the Internet.
croes 4y ago
Too soon to say that. Even if they are understaffed now it wouldn't immediately collapse.
- 93po 4y ago
  Performance has literally improved since the layoffs.
watwut 4y ago
He is selling waaay less ads and way cheaper then used to be. And while it has many reasons, him firing people who were actually selling those ads is one of them.

scaramanga 4y ago

I think a lot of people got caught up in a sort of mass mania induced by media portrayals of a billionaire genius with a mission to change the world for the better. Recent events have just given people permission to climb down from the collective psychosis.

Kiro 4y ago
I think it's dangerous to presume that the current narrative is clean from delusion and that only the previous discourse was a psychosis.

marvin 4y ago

Tesla has been hated on HN for years. Current sentiment is just a continuation of that long trend. I've kept a record of HN comment threads that keelhaul Tesla and Musk since around 2015 or so. I really believed in the company's mission and execution throughout those years (and still do), and wanted to keep a record of the very widespread opposing view. This in order to document it in case I was wrong, or in case I was right and someone claimed in retrospect that success was obvious and inevitable. I don't believe there has been a material change in sentiment.

throwaway894345 4y ago
I definitely perceive a shift in some people who were very pro-EV, pro-Tesla due to environmental concerns but became very anti-EV, anti-Tesla as it became apparent that Musk was not part of their political affiliation.
- lolinder 4y ago
  In RL or on HN? If on HN, you can be pro-EV and anti-Tesla (which is where I fall), so don't mistake a commenter taking that position with someone changing their mind.
  - throwaway894345 4y ago
    On social media. Agreed that you can be pro-EV and anti-Tesla; I am remarking about an observed change in tone from pro-EV, pro-Tesla to anti-EV, anti-Tesla.

h2odragon 4y ago

Musk spoke political heresy.

meepmorp 4y ago
Musk has been a jackass for years, and many of us saw through the facade well before now.
cactusplant7374 4y ago
Which is obviously a mistake if you’re a TSLA shareholder. Not knowing the political opinions of the CEO of your favorite company facilitates revenue.

lolinder 4y ago

HN is a forum with a lot of people in it with different opinions. Speaking as one of those who's always disliked Tesla and been turned off by Musk, one explanation is that the skeptics now feel more empowered to speak out than they did before. Also, depending on how far back you're talking, you may be overestimating how much unadulterated love there was for it before: I've been following conversations on Tesla here for years, and plenty of other vocal skeptics have been here for as long as I have.

notahacker 4y ago
I think the biggest shift is less the emergence of skepticism which was always there, and more that the people who would previously counter that Elon had always shown impeccable judgement and laser focus on big decisions, that we should trust him the promised FSD would be delivered soon or that he truly believed in the cause of free speech and would completely transform social media for the better tend to have gone a bit quiet.
- lolinder 4y ago
  Yes, I can see that! It's not that the skeptics weren't there before, it's that the Elon defenders are less willing to speak up than they were.
  - scaramanga 4y ago
    And the experience is like stepping out of an elevator that a football team had farted in and you'd been holding your breath for a decade. Let's enjoy this moment while it while it lasts. We'll back on another hype train of tech "making the world a better place" before you know it :)

hericium 4y ago

Did anything change? I was downvoted for calling out Musk as dangerous (...) unstable and unethical sociopath with so called "self driving" car a year ago[1] just as I was downvoted for pointinug out FSD is a myth just one day ago[2]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29750109 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29750109 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34105214 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34105214

scaramanga 4y ago
Bootlickers gonna lick. There's a reason tech is seen as the job that's "too plum to unionize." We are the most aligned with the beliefs and values of management and capital. We wouldn't have our nice jobs if we weren't. All that's happened here is that one paranoid delusional billionaire has a reactionary conspiracy theory that the most elite bootlicking workers in the economy are secretly all trotskyites in league with the woke marxist antifa at Ford and GM and other major advertisers etc.. The collateral damage of this has caused mass cognitive dissonance for people in tech who are either going to realise that maybe robber barons don't have our best interests at heart (shock!) or just double down on the bootlicking to see if that makes papa stop hitting us and love us again.

BaseballPhysics 4y ago

It might not be. I've never liked Elon, a view that was truly cemented during the "pedo guy" incident. In the past that meant I just ignored fawning articles or comment threads about this modern "Tony Stark" as I knew any critical comments would result in a pile-on from his supporters. Conversely, herds are gonna herd, and Musk fans are probably a lot less vocal these days compared to the days of peak Elon hero worship.

sethd 4y ago

It looks like my first public comment on Musk/Tesla was in February 2021 [0]. I remember getting hooked on the FSD fraud story sometime in 2019 and seeing many negative Musk/Tesla comments since that time. There’s always been some fanatic Musk supporters leaping to defend/apologize, but at least to me, it feels like the skepticism has been strong here for quite some time. [0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26065592 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26065592

jackmott 4y ago

[dead]

rvz 4y ago

It seems that recently, it is become trendy to hate Elon Musk because of the news where as I'm only critiquing FSD as I did a year ago against the fanatics [0], since that is obviously full of snake oil and false promises and a beta 'safety critical' product deployed to hundreds of thousands of drivers on the road. I don't see that level of deception yet with SpaceX, Starlink or Neuralink. Tesla cars themselves are also fine until you're talking about FSD which that is the problem and the scam that puts the lives of other drivers on the road at risk. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28000436 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28000436

foobiekr 4y ago
You don’t see that level of deception with Neuralink, which (he claims) will cure (in the near term) Parkinson’s, tinnitus, paralysis, etc.?
cactusplant7374 4y ago
Neuralink experiments are based on old experiments and nothing new. We have to ask ourselves why didn’t the research lab that originally did those experiments move forward with them? But the idea that this has any implications for healthy people is ludicrous. They can read a thousand neurons close to the brain’s surface. So? The understanding of the brain is incredibly limited and Musk won’t be able to access much of it anyway.

93po 4y ago

There are a lot of profit incentives for corporate media and established players in a lot of industries to smear to Elon. This results in a ton of bad media coverage, and people are a product of the information they consume. Over time this style of coverage embeds itself in people's minds, and we see what we're seeing now: posters that have never met elon, never spoke to him, and never worked with him stating ridiculous opinions about his motivations, his health, and mental status as fact.

c-cube 4y ago
He's on display on Twitter every day all day. No need for conspiratorial thinking, people can make their opinions based on years of lying about FSD, being an absolute asshole to (former) Twitter employees, and generally flailing around since he bought Twitter. What does meeting the guy in person have to do with anything?