7 ms·

The best counter argument to that is that he did manage to predict/make into reality electric vehicles (when going into that industry was crazy) and reusable ro

by qoez 10mo ago

The best counter argument to that is that he did manage to predict/make into reality electric vehicles (when going into that industry was crazy) and reusable rockets. If someone makes a thousand moonshot attempts but still succeeds with two that's impressive.

LunaSea 10mo ago
Electric vehicles were the first types of cars invented. Musk also bought into Tesla. So its not like he invented some kind of alien technology. It was always about having good enough marketing to permit 10 years of R&D to make the car actually attractive.
- kubb 10mo ago
  They were also mass produced before Tesla.
- SR2Z 10mo ago
  Nobody with any knowledge at all is claiming that Elon Musk invented electric cars. The simple truth is that he made electric cars viable competitors to gas-powered cars. His genius is not that he invented them, it's that he profitably manufactured decently reliable cars for a price that lots of people found attractive. You can try and dismiss it as "marketing," but things like the Gigapress and FSD/Autopilot are impressive technical achievements in their own right. Even more impressive is that he built up a new car company that didn't fold and has had the best selling car in the US for significant chunks of time. I don't like the guy, I think that FSD is dangerous, and I will never buy a Tesla for as long as he's in charge, but it's crazy that so many people feel the need to discredit his achievements. Sure, he benefited from selling carbon credits and EV subsidies, but if it were such an easy thing to do why did it take so long for anyone else to sell a good EV?
  - Animats 10mo ago
    Musk's behaviors should be separated into before drugs and after drugs. Since the day he smoked pot on camera, it's been all downhill.
    - Aarostotle 10mo ago
      Well reasoned. Before he smoked that reefer, his space company was catching the largest booster ever made with metal chopsticks, all paid for by global satellite internet revenue. His electric crossover/SUV was the best selling car in America. Now that he’s gotten distracted by politics I dislike, he’s not doing any of that. Definitely no longer the world’s greatest builder. /s
      - tw04 10mo ago
        > all paid for by global satellite internet revenue. Huh? You think starlink is funding space-x? If they lost all government and private launch business tomorrow and had to rely on Stalink revenues to stay in business they wouldn’t last through next month. > His electric crossover/SUV was the best selling car in America. It was, and then he fried his brain and decided to support fascists across the globe and can’t understand why people no longer want to support him or his businesses. He apparently watched handmaid’s tale and thought “man those Gilead guys are really onto something”.
        Aloha 10mo ago
        I dont think Starlink can actually make money without government subsidies and a whole lot of inactive users. It simply cannot scale, the width spot beams are limited by physics - they cannot get small enough to get the density needed.
        ben_w 10mo ago
        I think that's the point? I'd always assumed Starlink was a way to fill in coverage gaps in low-density areas where cable would cost more than it was worth, not cities?
        pavlov 10mo ago
        He didn’t need to watch Handmaid’s Tale. He grew up in 1970s South Africa and has never accepted that this model of society lost. He and Thiel claim South Africa’s current government is engaged in genocide against whites, but they have never criticized apartheid.
  - martin8412 10mo ago
    Gigapress has almost nothing to do with Tesla. It is just the name given by Tesla to a process they purchase from a third party vendor(Idra Group). Tesla was the first to use this product for large scale automotive production though.
    - SR2Z 10mo ago
      You say that like they bought something off the shelf which just worked the first time they used it. They did not - it was a collaboration and Tesla spent a lot of money and time to get it to work. I'm not gonna link the articles, but there are photos of the mountains of defective parts and plenty of people complaining about how terrible the first cars produced that way were. Tesla persevered and now other car manufacturers are trying to duplicate their results.
  - tw04 10mo ago
    > it's that he profitably manufactured decently reliable cars for a price that lots of people found attractive. Huh? Nearly all of his profit was government subsidies designed to push EV adoption. And now he’s trying to pull the ladder up behind him. Tesla has not been profitable for the vast majority of its existence when it comes to selling a car for more money than it takes to produce.
    - bawolff 10mo ago
      > Nearly all of his profit was government subsidies designed to push EV adoption The government subsidies were available to his competitors at the time. Its not like that gave him a competitive advantage. Everyone else was on the same playing field. [I hate that im defending that guy]
- _heimdall 10mo ago
  > Electric vehicles were the first types of cars invented. Where is this claim coming from? I don't see that in the history of the automobile wiki [1], and given that the first early motorized carriages were a century before Ben Franklin flew a kite I have to assume they were electric vehicles. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_automobile https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_automobile
lucianbr 10mo ago
Something is missing here. Once you get two moonshots done, you have free pass to claim anything any number of times with zero results? I cannot agree.
mikestew 10mo ago
he did manage to predict/make into reality electric vehicles (when going into that industry was crazy) Nissan might like a word about that.
- Workaccount2 10mo ago
  Nissan made a golf cart with an ecobox car cabin.
  - cosmic_cheese 10mo ago
    That’s underselling the Leaf quite a lot. The original 2011 model had 107 HP and 207 ft-lb of torque (later bumped to 147 and 236, respectively), which puts it handily above several gas models of gas cars that don’t get labeled as golf carts. It was a perfectly fine car, it just had a poor battery.
    - kortilla 10mo ago
      The issue is it had the range of a golf cart. So it basically ruled out 98% of the population that needs a car that can go on road trips. Tesla was the first to take range seriously.
      - sokoloff 10mo ago
        As a second car in a two-car family, we love our Leaf. It’s obviously unusable for road trips, but in a country with more registered cars than drivers, there are plenty of multi-car households where one could be a Leaf-class (cheap but still reliable) electric.
      - Neikius 10mo ago
        Sure, but the original Tesla car received exactly 0 Musk input. That was pretty much a done design when he bought the company. And ofc he ousted the original designers and tried to erase them from history. And the model 3 is pretty much building upon that.
aforwardslash 10mo ago
Reusable rockets are a rehash of old tech that was considered - at the time - not economically feasible; Given how subject to interpretation spacex commercial numbers are, there is nothing indicating a clear cost or efficiency advantage compared with traditional launch systems so far. What we clearly know is that using software development methodologies to building critical hardware is as a bad idea as it sounds.
- fooker 10mo ago
  Weird hill to die on in 2025 If you had said this in 2015, we would be nodding along
- kortilla 10mo ago
  There is no “subject to interpretation”. The costs they charge for launches are lower than any other provider by a significant margin. And fundraising docs have shown many times that the Falcon launches make money and Starlink was just starting to make money about 1.5 years ago. > What we clearly know is that using software development methodologies to building critical hardware is as a bad idea as it sounds. This methodology is what provides high speed, low latency internet to the South Pole and every other spot on earth allowed by regulatory.
  - Neikius 10mo ago
    Yeah, Falcon rockets are a regular workhorse kinda rockets. Nothing special about them. NASA could have made their own but someone decided it needs to be outsourced. I mean they did a fine job there, but nothing to write home about IMHO. And on the topic of reusability I can't really find much info besides that it is just partially reusable. Not sure what the point of it actually is. I guess what matters is the launch price? The question I still have it, wasn't SpaceX supposed to get USA back on the moon? And I heard they got billions in subsidies but have nothing to show for it.
    - ben_w 10mo ago
      > The question I still have it, wasn't SpaceX supposed to get USA back on the moon? And I heard they got billions in subsidies but have nothing to show for it. AFAICT, SpaceX are not the bottleneck holding this back. Or at least, not the only one. And they do have something to show for it, just not a complete final version. Starship is not yet fully reusable, and I will not make any bet on if they even can make it so as this is not my domain, but if you skip the re-use it is already capable of yeeting up a massive payload to LEO, enough to do a lunar mission.
wisty 10mo ago
[flagged]
- mullingitover 10mo ago
  The Lancet[1] forecasted Musk's 'bit of a jerk' elimination of USAID[1] will cause a death toll that puts him around 10x that of Pol Pot. > Projections suggest that ongoing deep funding cuts—combined with the potential dismantling of the agency—could result in more than 14 million additional deaths by 2030, including 4·5 million deaths among children younger than 5 years. [1] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(25)01186-9/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
  - wisty 10mo ago
    You mean Trump's elimination of USAID? You really think he's worse than Hitler?
    - mullingitover 10mo ago
      Let’s not pretend that Trump knew or cared what USAID was. Musk was extremely hands-on with the dismantling of that agency specifically. I didn’t share my thoughts, I shared a Lancet article calculating the death toll. I leave the math, the comparisons, and the moral judgments as an exercise for the reader.
      - wisty 10mo ago
        [flagged]
        ben_w 10mo ago
        I don't speak for mullingitover, but… "other" reasons? Surely all the stuff he's done are the reasons? And Musk seems to have tarred himself: Tesla sales are down a lot even in places where the market is growing, in part because it was lefty liberals who were the original primary market for EVs. Musk's support for Trump (who openly hates eco-friendly anything and appears to be tanking the US economy with inflation and tariffs and the only growth sector being AI DCs) also appears to be the reason the entire EV market in the US is going down. He's also having spats with various national leaders. But… look, in UK, Keir Starmer has catastrophically poor opinion poll ratings, Musk's managing to bob around the same level, slightly worse, in part due to tweeting things seen as calling for a civil war in the UK. Similar in Germany. Where the Gigafactory is… ah, still a building site, not having needed to expand to the full potential of the water licence it had. (A factoid I only know about due to comparisons with the combined AI data centre use across the state of Arizona).
rikroots 10mo ago
> he did manage to predict/make into reality electric vehicles I miss the morning delivery of milk to the doorstep. And the milk carts that used to deliver it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milk_float https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milk_float
- ben_w 10mo ago
  Likewise, but those were famously slow. Might have been expandable into other delivery vehicles, but neither the batteries nor the motors were up to being commuter vehicles… well, possibly electric bicycles back then, the European Blue Banana* was better positioned than much of the world to commute by bike, but not much more than that in performance or geography until much more recently. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Banana https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Banana
  - KaiserPro 10mo ago
    But they weren’t designed as a commuter car. THey were designed to deliver milk.
    - ben_w 10mo ago
      I'm saying they couldn't have been designed as commuter cars: "neither the batteries nor the motors were up to being commuter vehicles". Battery tech was way off on price/performance needed for commuting, until around Tesla happened: https://ourworldindata.org/battery-price-decline https://ourworldindata.org/battery-price-decline IIRC, similar issues with compact powerful electric motors, but I don't have a chart handy for that.

by qoez 10mo ago

LunaSea 10mo ago

Electric vehicles were the first types of cars invented. Musk also bought into Tesla. So its not like he invented some kind of alien technology. It was always about having good enough marketing to permit 10 years of R&D to make the car actually attractive.

kubb 10mo ago
They were also mass produced before Tesla.
SR2Z 10mo ago
Nobody with any knowledge at all is claiming that Elon Musk invented electric cars. The simple truth is that he made electric cars viable competitors to gas-powered cars. His genius is not that he invented them, it's that he profitably manufactured decently reliable cars for a price that lots of people found attractive. You can try and dismiss it as "marketing," but things like the Gigapress and FSD/Autopilot are impressive technical achievements in their own right. Even more impressive is that he built up a new car company that didn't fold and has had the best selling car in the US for significant chunks of time. I don't like the guy, I think that FSD is dangerous, and I will never buy a Tesla for as long as he's in charge, but it's crazy that so many people feel the need to discredit his achievements. Sure, he benefited from selling carbon credits and EV subsidies, but if it were such an easy thing to do why did it take so long for anyone else to sell a good EV?
- Animats 10mo ago
  Musk's behaviors should be separated into before drugs and after drugs. Since the day he smoked pot on camera, it's been all downhill.
  - Aarostotle 10mo ago
    Well reasoned. Before he smoked that reefer, his space company was catching the largest booster ever made with metal chopsticks, all paid for by global satellite internet revenue. His electric crossover/SUV was the best selling car in America. Now that he’s gotten distracted by politics I dislike, he’s not doing any of that. Definitely no longer the world’s greatest builder. /s
    - tw04 10mo ago
      > all paid for by global satellite internet revenue. Huh? You think starlink is funding space-x? If they lost all government and private launch business tomorrow and had to rely on Stalink revenues to stay in business they wouldn’t last through next month. > His electric crossover/SUV was the best selling car in America. It was, and then he fried his brain and decided to support fascists across the globe and can’t understand why people no longer want to support him or his businesses. He apparently watched handmaid’s tale and thought “man those Gilead guys are really onto something”.
      - Aloha 10mo ago
        I dont think Starlink can actually make money without government subsidies and a whole lot of inactive users. It simply cannot scale, the width spot beams are limited by physics - they cannot get small enough to get the density needed.
        ben_w 10mo ago
        I think that's the point? I'd always assumed Starlink was a way to fill in coverage gaps in low-density areas where cable would cost more than it was worth, not cities?
      - pavlov 10mo ago
        He didn’t need to watch Handmaid’s Tale. He grew up in 1970s South Africa and has never accepted that this model of society lost. He and Thiel claim South Africa’s current government is engaged in genocide against whites, but they have never criticized apartheid.
- martin8412 10mo ago
  Gigapress has almost nothing to do with Tesla. It is just the name given by Tesla to a process they purchase from a third party vendor(Idra Group). Tesla was the first to use this product for large scale automotive production though.
  - SR2Z 10mo ago
    You say that like they bought something off the shelf which just worked the first time they used it. They did not - it was a collaboration and Tesla spent a lot of money and time to get it to work. I'm not gonna link the articles, but there are photos of the mountains of defective parts and plenty of people complaining about how terrible the first cars produced that way were. Tesla persevered and now other car manufacturers are trying to duplicate their results.
- tw04 10mo ago
  > it's that he profitably manufactured decently reliable cars for a price that lots of people found attractive. Huh? Nearly all of his profit was government subsidies designed to push EV adoption. And now he’s trying to pull the ladder up behind him. Tesla has not been profitable for the vast majority of its existence when it comes to selling a car for more money than it takes to produce.
  - bawolff 10mo ago
    > Nearly all of his profit was government subsidies designed to push EV adoption The government subsidies were available to his competitors at the time. Its not like that gave him a competitive advantage. Everyone else was on the same playing field. [I hate that im defending that guy]
_heimdall 10mo ago
> Electric vehicles were the first types of cars invented. Where is this claim coming from? I don't see that in the history of the automobile wiki [1], and given that the first early motorized carriages were a century before Ben Franklin flew a kite I have to assume they were electric vehicles. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_automobile https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_automobile

lucianbr 10mo ago

Something is missing here. Once you get two moonshots done, you have free pass to claim anything any number of times with zero results? I cannot agree.

mikestew 10mo ago

he did manage to predict/make into reality electric vehicles (when going into that industry was crazy) Nissan might like a word about that.

Workaccount2 10mo ago
Nissan made a golf cart with an ecobox car cabin.
- cosmic_cheese 10mo ago
  That’s underselling the Leaf quite a lot. The original 2011 model had 107 HP and 207 ft-lb of torque (later bumped to 147 and 236, respectively), which puts it handily above several gas models of gas cars that don’t get labeled as golf carts. It was a perfectly fine car, it just had a poor battery.
  - kortilla 10mo ago
    The issue is it had the range of a golf cart. So it basically ruled out 98% of the population that needs a car that can go on road trips. Tesla was the first to take range seriously.
    - sokoloff 10mo ago
      As a second car in a two-car family, we love our Leaf. It’s obviously unusable for road trips, but in a country with more registered cars than drivers, there are plenty of multi-car households where one could be a Leaf-class (cheap but still reliable) electric.
    - Neikius 10mo ago
      Sure, but the original Tesla car received exactly 0 Musk input. That was pretty much a done design when he bought the company. And ofc he ousted the original designers and tried to erase them from history. And the model 3 is pretty much building upon that.

aforwardslash 10mo ago

Reusable rockets are a rehash of old tech that was considered - at the time - not economically feasible; Given how subject to interpretation spacex commercial numbers are, there is nothing indicating a clear cost or efficiency advantage compared with traditional launch systems so far. What we clearly know is that using software development methodologies to building critical hardware is as a bad idea as it sounds.

fooker 10mo ago
Weird hill to die on in 2025 If you had said this in 2015, we would be nodding along
kortilla 10mo ago
There is no “subject to interpretation”. The costs they charge for launches are lower than any other provider by a significant margin. And fundraising docs have shown many times that the Falcon launches make money and Starlink was just starting to make money about 1.5 years ago. > What we clearly know is that using software development methodologies to building critical hardware is as a bad idea as it sounds. This methodology is what provides high speed, low latency internet to the South Pole and every other spot on earth allowed by regulatory.
- Neikius 10mo ago
  Yeah, Falcon rockets are a regular workhorse kinda rockets. Nothing special about them. NASA could have made their own but someone decided it needs to be outsourced. I mean they did a fine job there, but nothing to write home about IMHO. And on the topic of reusability I can't really find much info besides that it is just partially reusable. Not sure what the point of it actually is. I guess what matters is the launch price? The question I still have it, wasn't SpaceX supposed to get USA back on the moon? And I heard they got billions in subsidies but have nothing to show for it.
  - ben_w 10mo ago
    > The question I still have it, wasn't SpaceX supposed to get USA back on the moon? And I heard they got billions in subsidies but have nothing to show for it. AFAICT, SpaceX are not the bottleneck holding this back. Or at least, not the only one. And they do have something to show for it, just not a complete final version. Starship is not yet fully reusable, and I will not make any bet on if they even can make it so as this is not my domain, but if you skip the re-use it is already capable of yeeting up a massive payload to LEO, enough to do a lunar mission.

wisty 10mo ago

[flagged]

mullingitover 10mo ago
The Lancet[1] forecasted Musk's 'bit of a jerk' elimination of USAID[1] will cause a death toll that puts him around 10x that of Pol Pot. > Projections suggest that ongoing deep funding cuts—combined with the potential dismantling of the agency—could result in more than 14 million additional deaths by 2030, including 4·5 million deaths among children younger than 5 years. [1] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(25)01186-9/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
- wisty 10mo ago
  You mean Trump's elimination of USAID? You really think he's worse than Hitler?
  - mullingitover 10mo ago
    Let’s not pretend that Trump knew or cared what USAID was. Musk was extremely hands-on with the dismantling of that agency specifically. I didn’t share my thoughts, I shared a Lancet article calculating the death toll. I leave the math, the comparisons, and the moral judgments as an exercise for the reader.
    - wisty 10mo ago
      [flagged]
      - ben_w 10mo ago
        I don't speak for mullingitover, but… "other" reasons? Surely all the stuff he's done are the reasons? And Musk seems to have tarred himself: Tesla sales are down a lot even in places where the market is growing, in part because it was lefty liberals who were the original primary market for EVs. Musk's support for Trump (who openly hates eco-friendly anything and appears to be tanking the US economy with inflation and tariffs and the only growth sector being AI DCs) also appears to be the reason the entire EV market in the US is going down. He's also having spats with various national leaders. But… look, in UK, Keir Starmer has catastrophically poor opinion poll ratings, Musk's managing to bob around the same level, slightly worse, in part due to tweeting things seen as calling for a civil war in the UK. Similar in Germany. Where the Gigafactory is… ah, still a building site, not having needed to expand to the full potential of the water licence it had. (A factoid I only know about due to comparisons with the combined AI data centre use across the state of Arizona).

rikroots 10mo ago

> he did manage to predict/make into reality electric vehicles I miss the morning delivery of milk to the doorstep. And the milk carts that used to deliver it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milk_float https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milk_float

ben_w 10mo ago
Likewise, but those were famously slow. Might have been expandable into other delivery vehicles, but neither the batteries nor the motors were up to being commuter vehicles… well, possibly electric bicycles back then, the European Blue Banana* was better positioned than much of the world to commute by bike, but not much more than that in performance or geography until much more recently. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Banana https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Banana
- KaiserPro 10mo ago
  But they weren’t designed as a commuter car. THey were designed to deliver milk.
  - ben_w 10mo ago
    I'm saying they couldn't have been designed as commuter cars: "neither the batteries nor the motors were up to being commuter vehicles". Battery tech was way off on price/performance needed for commuting, until around Tesla happened: https://ourworldindata.org/battery-price-decline https://ourworldindata.org/battery-price-decline IIRC, similar issues with compact powerful electric motors, but I don't have a chart handy for that.