5 ms·

Elon, at some point in the past, would have been embarrassed to sell this product at this price. That it shipped feels indicative of how bent he’s gotten.

api 3y ago
[flagged]
- ulfw 3y ago
  Or he was just lying all along in order to get the SV elite behind him, get the mighty tech dollars for cheap, raise to lofty valuations based on hype ('Mars', 'Hyperloop', 'Tunnels') and broken promises ('FSD next year') and become a multi billionaire. Now that he has achieved ridiculous richness he is showing his real face more openly.
  - api 3y ago
    The reusable rockets are real. The cool EVs are real, though Tesla is obviously losing its edge more than SpaceX. Pure bullshitters don’t do that. No he didn’t personally build all that stuff, but there is far too much of a trail of success here for the guy to have been a fool. He was at least clearly quite good at selling a vision and knowing who to hire and promote to make it happen. That’s not as easy as it sounds. I’ve followed him since before he was famous and I remember hearing early interviews of his. I think he was genuinely a genius. Was. Today he seems totally fried. I suspect drug abuse is a major factor. I also strongly suspect he’s bipolar, and that can worsen with age especially if you are not rigorous about treating it and taking care of yourself. I think people want to recon him into a fool because the fall is actually pretty damn depressing. It’s easier to say he was always like this than to realize that drugs and social media (hard to say which was worse) took a great mind.
    - rpmisms 3y ago
      I think he aged out of optimism, and now feels a sense of social responsibility appropriate for his age, and is applying the same tactics he used to become so successful in rocketry and automotion.
      - throwup238 3y ago
        There's always another other coping mechanism.
        rpmisms 3y ago
        I'm fine with this one. Massive amounts of money spent on the opposite of the political orthodoxy is always fun.
        felixgallo 3y ago
        Oh, I don’t know, last time was a little unfun in Europe for a while.
        rpmisms 3y ago
        And directly resulted in the best era Europe has ever had.
        felixgallo 3y ago
        I mean, unless you're one of the 75 million people who died in the massacres, the concentration camps, the firebombing, the disease, the starvation. Maybe we could find a way to have a great era without that, they might suggest.
        api 3y ago
        Being bombed to death, losing tens of millions in death camps and trench warfare, and then being divided in half between the USA and Russia for 70 years? Really?
    - epistasis 3y ago
      I don't think Elon did any of that either, except to bring money to smarter people to actually build those things.
      - fragmede 3y ago
        bringing money to smarter people to actually build things is huge! even if that is all he did, why do we down play that?
        epistasis 3y ago
        In Silicon Valley there's lots of ways to get money to smart people. And for Tesla, he wasn't even a founder, he just kind of took over. With every success there's some amount of luck, and some amount of accrued power, and some amount of grit and novel creation. It's increasingly looking like the less that Musk has his hands on things, the better "his" companies do. He may have lots of leftover power from his early luck, but others need to rein him in for any sort of success to happen. Now that his ego is too big, we get whatever has been happening for the past few years.
        fragmede 3y ago
        > In Silicon Valley there's lots of ways to get money to smart people. The site we're on is a testament to that. Even if Elon is just a successful VC investor and not an engineer, why denigrate that? I'm not saying this out of any love for Elon, but to recognize that getting the right people together in the right time and place and funding them is, in and of itself, and accomplishment. eg Al Gore and creating the Internet.
    - Fricken 3y ago
      There's a lot of rationalizing going on in this thread. Musk didn't invent Paypal, he didn't found Tesla, he didn't design a single rocket for SpaceX (he bought a bunch of ship designs from NASA which they then reused). He puts his name on these companies and pretends to be the only thing holding these companies together. He was always like this.
      - spencerchubb 3y ago
        This is a bad argument. "He didn't actually do the work". Well duh. Lots of things are done as a team. He was on the team at three monumental companies. You seem to believe he just got lucky. But if it happens 3 times, it's not an exception, it's a pattern.
        Fricken 3y ago
        There is no alternate history timeline where Elon and his army of insecure, raging manchildren didn't suck up all the oxygen in the room so I guess we'll never know how much better things could have been.
        deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
        gamblor956 3y ago
        I've "been on the team" at more than a dozen monumental companies. Doesn't mean I get to take credit for the stuff they've done... And objectively speaking, the fact that everything Musk micromanages is an abysmal failure is proof that Musk was not behind the rockets, or the EVs. SpaceX was going nowhere until Shotwell took over. Tesla was going nowhere until Musk brought in qualified executives from other carkmakers. Boring's a failure to launch. Neuralink is touting "accomplishments" that were already accomplished decades ago. X is worse now after 1.5 years of Musk ownership.
        spencerchubb 3y ago
        You should be more positive. You do get to claim partial credit for the teams you were on :) If you were very early to the team, you get to claim a larger fraction of credit as well
    - slimebot80 3y ago
      His brain didn't do the rocket science or the EV engineering. He's an investor who knows a bit of science, and is able to inspire people - which translates to money. Inspiring people is a great skill and it could have been great for everyone to have that central push. But the many years of grifting has been exposed now, so maybe he feels like he's got nothing to loose.
- reactordev 3y ago
  There was pre-Covid Elon, and then there’s this Elon. I imagine this is how Scrooge started if it were set in modern day. Only there’s no ghosts and he just becomes a bitter old man.
  - orwin 3y ago
    Nah, it started before. The comments on the 'pedo guy' who saved a dozen children and refused Elon's 'submarine' idea was what made me realize his ego became a hindrance to himself. Might be too much drugs (but imho it doesn't track), but in this thread someone said 'not enough sleep' and this would be a much better explanation. Or he is in a long burnout for a decade, and no one told him to calm down.
    - droopyEyelids 3y ago
      The problem with blaming it on drugs is how many people take drugs without turning into huge assholes/idiots.
      - nurettin 3y ago
        Haven't met any user who did not become deranged.
  - jcranmer 3y ago
    Elon always had a smarter-than-thou attitude, it's just that when he was only using it to sell cool sci-fi projects, it didn't stick out as much. But when he started branching out into other projects, where his lack of knowledge was more apparent to most people, it became increasingly clear just how petulant he was when he found it he wasn't the smartest person in the room. For me, not that I ever gave much thought to Elon since space wasn't really my thing, it was the idiocy of the Loop proposal that turned me off of him. For other people, it might have been hyperloop, or it might have been the rejection of his submarine idea (see sibling comment for more details there). If you didn't notice it until after he was chafing at all the covid restrictions, you weren't paying enough attention.
- DANmode 3y ago
  Doubt it's drugs. At least, didn't start that way. He just wasn't sleeping, and I think dominos may have kept falling.
  - cogman10 3y ago
    He was also chronically online. I think his brain was broken by too many 4chan memes
  - jordanb 3y ago
    It's fairly well known that Elon has been using ketamine for years. And probably quite a few other things. There've been reports from insiders about having to dry him out for important meetings. https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2024-01-08/elon-musks-drug-use-is-the-latest-headache-for-teslas-board https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2024-01-08/elon-musks...
- oxide 3y ago
  The problem with being an intelligent drug (ab)user is that some things about drugs are only learned through irreversible experience. At least in my irreversible experience.
demondemidi 3y ago
Or he’s always been an asshole conman and we’re just seeing it because his giant ego has led him to ignore his press advisor.
- snapplebobapple 3y ago
  I would bet it's more he cares way less about tesla now that the hard stuff is done and the huge factories are designed and spitting out vehicles. He's moved on to spacex and that brain implant place, where there's still plenty of really hard engineering going on. I don't think it's fair to say any era of Elon would be ashamed of taking money from people either. he's always like money and has had no problem shipping crap as the v1 of something, to be improved later.
  - penjelly 3y ago
    most importantly, self driving is not done and in Elons own words its what makes the company worth billions or next to nothing. Just because Elon says hes an engineer doesnt mean its true.
  - browningstreet 3y ago
    I'd agree with this take. Elon through 3/Y was relative market/product aligned. Cybertruck, FSD failures, and yoke/no-stalks are perversions of the "thinking freely" product patterns he had before.
bananapub 3y ago
which era Elon do you feel would be embarrassed to take money from fans?

api 3y ago

[flagged]

ulfw 3y ago
Or he was just lying all along in order to get the SV elite behind him, get the mighty tech dollars for cheap, raise to lofty valuations based on hype ('Mars', 'Hyperloop', 'Tunnels') and broken promises ('FSD next year') and become a multi billionaire. Now that he has achieved ridiculous richness he is showing his real face more openly.
- api 3y ago
  The reusable rockets are real. The cool EVs are real, though Tesla is obviously losing its edge more than SpaceX. Pure bullshitters don’t do that. No he didn’t personally build all that stuff, but there is far too much of a trail of success here for the guy to have been a fool. He was at least clearly quite good at selling a vision and knowing who to hire and promote to make it happen. That’s not as easy as it sounds. I’ve followed him since before he was famous and I remember hearing early interviews of his. I think he was genuinely a genius. Was. Today he seems totally fried. I suspect drug abuse is a major factor. I also strongly suspect he’s bipolar, and that can worsen with age especially if you are not rigorous about treating it and taking care of yourself. I think people want to recon him into a fool because the fall is actually pretty damn depressing. It’s easier to say he was always like this than to realize that drugs and social media (hard to say which was worse) took a great mind.
  - rpmisms 3y ago
    I think he aged out of optimism, and now feels a sense of social responsibility appropriate for his age, and is applying the same tactics he used to become so successful in rocketry and automotion.
    - throwup238 3y ago
      There's always another other coping mechanism.
      - rpmisms 3y ago
        I'm fine with this one. Massive amounts of money spent on the opposite of the political orthodoxy is always fun.
        felixgallo 3y ago
        Oh, I don’t know, last time was a little unfun in Europe for a while.
        rpmisms 3y ago
        And directly resulted in the best era Europe has ever had.
        felixgallo 3y ago
        I mean, unless you're one of the 75 million people who died in the massacres, the concentration camps, the firebombing, the disease, the starvation. Maybe we could find a way to have a great era without that, they might suggest.
        api 3y ago
        Being bombed to death, losing tens of millions in death camps and trench warfare, and then being divided in half between the USA and Russia for 70 years? Really?
  - epistasis 3y ago
    I don't think Elon did any of that either, except to bring money to smarter people to actually build those things.
    - fragmede 3y ago
      bringing money to smarter people to actually build things is huge! even if that is all he did, why do we down play that?
      - epistasis 3y ago
        In Silicon Valley there's lots of ways to get money to smart people. And for Tesla, he wasn't even a founder, he just kind of took over. With every success there's some amount of luck, and some amount of accrued power, and some amount of grit and novel creation. It's increasingly looking like the less that Musk has his hands on things, the better "his" companies do. He may have lots of leftover power from his early luck, but others need to rein him in for any sort of success to happen. Now that his ego is too big, we get whatever has been happening for the past few years.
        fragmede 3y ago
        > In Silicon Valley there's lots of ways to get money to smart people. The site we're on is a testament to that. Even if Elon is just a successful VC investor and not an engineer, why denigrate that? I'm not saying this out of any love for Elon, but to recognize that getting the right people together in the right time and place and funding them is, in and of itself, and accomplishment. eg Al Gore and creating the Internet.
  - Fricken 3y ago
    There's a lot of rationalizing going on in this thread. Musk didn't invent Paypal, he didn't found Tesla, he didn't design a single rocket for SpaceX (he bought a bunch of ship designs from NASA which they then reused). He puts his name on these companies and pretends to be the only thing holding these companies together. He was always like this.
    - spencerchubb 3y ago
      This is a bad argument. "He didn't actually do the work". Well duh. Lots of things are done as a team. He was on the team at three monumental companies. You seem to believe he just got lucky. But if it happens 3 times, it's not an exception, it's a pattern.
      - Fricken 3y ago
        There is no alternate history timeline where Elon and his army of insecure, raging manchildren didn't suck up all the oxygen in the room so I guess we'll never know how much better things could have been.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - gamblor956 3y ago
        I've "been on the team" at more than a dozen monumental companies. Doesn't mean I get to take credit for the stuff they've done... And objectively speaking, the fact that everything Musk micromanages is an abysmal failure is proof that Musk was not behind the rockets, or the EVs. SpaceX was going nowhere until Shotwell took over. Tesla was going nowhere until Musk brought in qualified executives from other carkmakers. Boring's a failure to launch. Neuralink is touting "accomplishments" that were already accomplished decades ago. X is worse now after 1.5 years of Musk ownership.
        spencerchubb 3y ago
        You should be more positive. You do get to claim partial credit for the teams you were on :) If you were very early to the team, you get to claim a larger fraction of credit as well
  - slimebot80 3y ago
    His brain didn't do the rocket science or the EV engineering. He's an investor who knows a bit of science, and is able to inspire people - which translates to money. Inspiring people is a great skill and it could have been great for everyone to have that central push. But the many years of grifting has been exposed now, so maybe he feels like he's got nothing to loose.
reactordev 3y ago
There was pre-Covid Elon, and then there’s this Elon. I imagine this is how Scrooge started if it were set in modern day. Only there’s no ghosts and he just becomes a bitter old man.
- orwin 3y ago
  Nah, it started before. The comments on the 'pedo guy' who saved a dozen children and refused Elon's 'submarine' idea was what made me realize his ego became a hindrance to himself. Might be too much drugs (but imho it doesn't track), but in this thread someone said 'not enough sleep' and this would be a much better explanation. Or he is in a long burnout for a decade, and no one told him to calm down.
  - droopyEyelids 3y ago
    The problem with blaming it on drugs is how many people take drugs without turning into huge assholes/idiots.
    - nurettin 3y ago
      Haven't met any user who did not become deranged.
- jcranmer 3y ago
  Elon always had a smarter-than-thou attitude, it's just that when he was only using it to sell cool sci-fi projects, it didn't stick out as much. But when he started branching out into other projects, where his lack of knowledge was more apparent to most people, it became increasingly clear just how petulant he was when he found it he wasn't the smartest person in the room. For me, not that I ever gave much thought to Elon since space wasn't really my thing, it was the idiocy of the Loop proposal that turned me off of him. For other people, it might have been hyperloop, or it might have been the rejection of his submarine idea (see sibling comment for more details there). If you didn't notice it until after he was chafing at all the covid restrictions, you weren't paying enough attention.
DANmode 3y ago
Doubt it's drugs. At least, didn't start that way. He just wasn't sleeping, and I think dominos may have kept falling.
- cogman10 3y ago
  He was also chronically online. I think his brain was broken by too many 4chan memes
- jordanb 3y ago
  It's fairly well known that Elon has been using ketamine for years. And probably quite a few other things. There've been reports from insiders about having to dry him out for important meetings. https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2024-01-08/elon-musks-drug-use-is-the-latest-headache-for-teslas-board https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2024-01-08/elon-musks...
oxide 3y ago
The problem with being an intelligent drug (ab)user is that some things about drugs are only learned through irreversible experience. At least in my irreversible experience.

demondemidi 3y ago

Or he’s always been an asshole conman and we’re just seeing it because his giant ego has led him to ignore his press advisor.

snapplebobapple 3y ago
I would bet it's more he cares way less about tesla now that the hard stuff is done and the huge factories are designed and spitting out vehicles. He's moved on to spacex and that brain implant place, where there's still plenty of really hard engineering going on. I don't think it's fair to say any era of Elon would be ashamed of taking money from people either. he's always like money and has had no problem shipping crap as the v1 of something, to be improved later.
- penjelly 3y ago
  most importantly, self driving is not done and in Elons own words its what makes the company worth billions or next to nothing. Just because Elon says hes an engineer doesnt mean its true.
- browningstreet 3y ago
  I'd agree with this take. Elon through 3/Y was relative market/product aligned. Cybertruck, FSD failures, and yoke/no-stalks are perversions of the "thinking freely" product patterns he had before.

bananapub 3y ago

which era Elon do you feel would be embarrassed to take money from fans?