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You speak as if Elon Musk didn't buy tons of AI chips for full self driving (Dojo) and COMPLETELY flub it. It's the same as always. Musk himself is an awful bu

You speak as if Elon Musk didn't buy tons of AI chips for full self driving (Dojo) and COMPLETELY flub it. It's the same as always. Musk himself is an awful business man. He relies upon buying the success of others and taking over. Outside of that, he's kind of awful. Initiatives started by Musk himself almost inevitably fail.

fastball 5mo ago
Tesla wasn't "successful" before he "took it over" (read: invested most of their seed capital and ran the actual day-to-day operations). SpaceX, founded entirely by him alone, is also the most valuable space technology company on earth, so...
- dragontamer 5mo ago
  Well sure. But that's not AI chips or FSD. The subject of this whole topic. Within this realm of AI, Musk has constantly invested and failed. Dojo, xAI, Grok. His newest idea is leveraging SpaceX money to put data centers in Space. Good luck with that.
  - fastball 5mo ago
    Your previous comment was clearly not constraining itself to the realm of AI chips / FSD. Regardless: How do you measure Dojo, xAI, and Grok being failures? Dojo is training models for FSD, which is in operation today. The chips in Tesla cars are also taped in-house / vertically integrated, a lot of which is presumably shared investment with the chips needed for the Dojo training side specifically. Separating xAI from Grok (in a list like this) is kinda weird, but seems that Grok is actually a very capable LLM, even if it is not best-in-practice. Even if not beating out the top 3 labs, it certainly seems to be in the top 5 by most metrics. The xAI Colossus data centers are real AI training/inference infrastructure that were stood up in record time, and they are now selling capacity to other LLM providers. Is that a failure?
    - dragontamer 5mo ago
      https://finance.yahoo.com/news/tesla-shuts-down-dojo-ai-221950747.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/tesla-shuts-down-dojo-ai-2219... Dojo is shutdown dude. Literally doing nothing but rotting. After spending $Billions on a custom chip, Tesla is now just buying NVidia chips and wasting their Dojo efforts entirely Team dismantled. Operations closed. Game over. --------- A similar event is playing out with xAI. Operations are transferring over to SpaceX. Out of money, out of time. They're going to try to grab more money (possibly illegally) across Musks enterprises but there's some severe legal questions on the legality of these moves. It's already sketchy as all hell that xAI bought Tesla's GPU fleet. Now SpaceX is buying it up under doubious circumstances. Whatever is going on with xAI / Twitter is now clear. It's not possible for it to stand on its own two feet and needs external investors to continue to survive.
      - fastball 5mo ago
        Ok, but Dojo clearly has a spiritual successor in the form of: whatever Tesla is currently using to train FSD models? Like... Tesla kills teams all the time. Sounds like many were absorbed into the rest of the org. Seems like a bit of a nothing-burger without the follow-up that Tesla is shutting down FSD ambitions in general (or similar).
        dragontamer 5mo ago
        Yeah. It's called NVidia GPUs. IE: Tesla spent over a $Billion building a team and custom building Dojo chips only to fire the entire team, throw away their chips and buy NVidia.
        fastball 5mo ago
        Are they replacing their onboard chips with NVidia chips? AFAICT Tesla has increased investment in their own chip ambitions. Dojo specifically being cut is a massive failure if you are motivated to believe that, but otherwise it looks more like a subset of custom chip work that didn't pay off and the company has appropriately cut their losses. The onboard "AI2/3/4/5" chips are clearly the bigger investment (they can be found on every Tesla vehicle) and do not seem to be going anywhere at the moment.
- cedws 5mo ago
  If you look at initiatives rather than companies most of what Musk has done has been a failure. Boring Company, Hyperloop, Roadster, Semi, full self driving, robotaxis, solar roofs, Optimus, mission around the moon, men on Mars. The list goes on. Tesla is an incredibly overvalued company rapidly losing ground to China that survives by Musk’s image of being a futurist, and by announcing fake products that never see the light of day. SpaceX has been headed by Gwynne Shotwell since the early days and usually when Musk inserted himself it’s been a mess.
pizzafeelsright 5mo ago
10 years returns S&P 500 (index of all those better than Musk): 261% Tesla: 2700% Disclaimer: My portfolio is 65% Tesla.
- Calavar 5mo ago
  GME also beat the S&P 500 over the past 10 years. Is this evidence that Ryan Cohen is a business genius? Tesla has been a meme stock for about five years now, maybe more. Its valuation correlates with Musk's abilities as a showman and media figure, not a businessman.
  - filoleg 5mo ago
    > GME also beat the S&P 500 over the past 10 years. Is this evidence that Ryan Cohen is a business genius? GME did not beat the S&P500 over the past 10 years, and it is just the evidence of you needing to verify your claims before making them. Over the past 5 years[0]: S&P500 up by 77%, GME down by 50%. Over the past 10 years: S&P500 up by 260%, GME up by 207%. GME performance in the past 10 years doesn't indicate that Ryan Cohen is a business genius. It indicates that he runs a company that has been underperforming the market for at least the past decade. 0. https://www.google.com/finance/beta/quote/.INX:INDEXSP?window=5Y&keymoments=false&comparison=GME%3ANYSE&type=line https://www.google.com/finance/beta/quote/.INX:INDEXSP?windo...
    - Calavar 5mo ago
      I did look up numbers before I made that claim: From Yahoo Finance GME Jan 1, 2016: $7.09, $5.49 adjusted (accounting for dividend disbursements) GME Jan 1, 2026: $20.09 266% or 365% return depending on how you count dividends. 365% for GME vs. 306% for S&P 500 over the same period (also using adjusted for dividend numbers).
      - lotsofpulp 5mo ago
        For the previous 10 years, dividends reinvested, GME returned 14.59% per year, SP500 did 15.376% per year. Considering the much, much higher risk of owning a single stock, the risk adjusted return of SP500 is much higher than GME. https://dqydj.com/stock-return-calculator/ https://dqydj.com/stock-return-calculator/ https://dqydj.com/sp-500-return-calculator/ https://dqydj.com/sp-500-return-calculator/
saulapremium 5mo ago
I absolute abhor the man but I think this is silly. No doubt that he has had luck and help, but he is still a good businessman. He's certainly an asshole (almost certainly dark triad territory), but I think that can be a benefit when creating a business.
- dragontamer 5mo ago
  It isn't helping him in this fight vs Sam Altman, AI investments or the like.

fastball 5mo ago

Tesla wasn't "successful" before he "took it over" (read: invested most of their seed capital and ran the actual day-to-day operations). SpaceX, founded entirely by him alone, is also the most valuable space technology company on earth, so...

dragontamer 5mo ago
Well sure. But that's not AI chips or FSD. The subject of this whole topic. Within this realm of AI, Musk has constantly invested and failed. Dojo, xAI, Grok. His newest idea is leveraging SpaceX money to put data centers in Space. Good luck with that.
- fastball 5mo ago
  Your previous comment was clearly not constraining itself to the realm of AI chips / FSD. Regardless: How do you measure Dojo, xAI, and Grok being failures? Dojo is training models for FSD, which is in operation today. The chips in Tesla cars are also taped in-house / vertically integrated, a lot of which is presumably shared investment with the chips needed for the Dojo training side specifically. Separating xAI from Grok (in a list like this) is kinda weird, but seems that Grok is actually a very capable LLM, even if it is not best-in-practice. Even if not beating out the top 3 labs, it certainly seems to be in the top 5 by most metrics. The xAI Colossus data centers are real AI training/inference infrastructure that were stood up in record time, and they are now selling capacity to other LLM providers. Is that a failure?
  - dragontamer 5mo ago
    https://finance.yahoo.com/news/tesla-shuts-down-dojo-ai-221950747.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/tesla-shuts-down-dojo-ai-2219... Dojo is shutdown dude. Literally doing nothing but rotting. After spending $Billions on a custom chip, Tesla is now just buying NVidia chips and wasting their Dojo efforts entirely Team dismantled. Operations closed. Game over. --------- A similar event is playing out with xAI. Operations are transferring over to SpaceX. Out of money, out of time. They're going to try to grab more money (possibly illegally) across Musks enterprises but there's some severe legal questions on the legality of these moves. It's already sketchy as all hell that xAI bought Tesla's GPU fleet. Now SpaceX is buying it up under doubious circumstances. Whatever is going on with xAI / Twitter is now clear. It's not possible for it to stand on its own two feet and needs external investors to continue to survive.
    - fastball 5mo ago
      Ok, but Dojo clearly has a spiritual successor in the form of: whatever Tesla is currently using to train FSD models? Like... Tesla kills teams all the time. Sounds like many were absorbed into the rest of the org. Seems like a bit of a nothing-burger without the follow-up that Tesla is shutting down FSD ambitions in general (or similar).
      - dragontamer 5mo ago
        Yeah. It's called NVidia GPUs. IE: Tesla spent over a $Billion building a team and custom building Dojo chips only to fire the entire team, throw away their chips and buy NVidia.
        fastball 5mo ago
        Are they replacing their onboard chips with NVidia chips? AFAICT Tesla has increased investment in their own chip ambitions. Dojo specifically being cut is a massive failure if you are motivated to believe that, but otherwise it looks more like a subset of custom chip work that didn't pay off and the company has appropriately cut their losses. The onboard "AI2/3/4/5" chips are clearly the bigger investment (they can be found on every Tesla vehicle) and do not seem to be going anywhere at the moment.
cedws 5mo ago
If you look at initiatives rather than companies most of what Musk has done has been a failure. Boring Company, Hyperloop, Roadster, Semi, full self driving, robotaxis, solar roofs, Optimus, mission around the moon, men on Mars. The list goes on. Tesla is an incredibly overvalued company rapidly losing ground to China that survives by Musk’s image of being a futurist, and by announcing fake products that never see the light of day. SpaceX has been headed by Gwynne Shotwell since the early days and usually when Musk inserted himself it’s been a mess.

pizzafeelsright 5mo ago

10 years returns S&P 500 (index of all those better than Musk): 261% Tesla: 2700% Disclaimer: My portfolio is 65% Tesla.

Calavar 5mo ago
GME also beat the S&P 500 over the past 10 years. Is this evidence that Ryan Cohen is a business genius? Tesla has been a meme stock for about five years now, maybe more. Its valuation correlates with Musk's abilities as a showman and media figure, not a businessman.
- filoleg 5mo ago
  > GME also beat the S&P 500 over the past 10 years. Is this evidence that Ryan Cohen is a business genius? GME did not beat the S&P500 over the past 10 years, and it is just the evidence of you needing to verify your claims before making them. Over the past 5 years[0]: S&P500 up by 77%, GME down by 50%. Over the past 10 years: S&P500 up by 260%, GME up by 207%. GME performance in the past 10 years doesn't indicate that Ryan Cohen is a business genius. It indicates that he runs a company that has been underperforming the market for at least the past decade. 0. https://www.google.com/finance/beta/quote/.INX:INDEXSP?window=5Y&keymoments=false&comparison=GME%3ANYSE&type=line https://www.google.com/finance/beta/quote/.INX:INDEXSP?windo...
  - Calavar 5mo ago
    I did look up numbers before I made that claim: From Yahoo Finance GME Jan 1, 2016: $7.09, $5.49 adjusted (accounting for dividend disbursements) GME Jan 1, 2026: $20.09 266% or 365% return depending on how you count dividends. 365% for GME vs. 306% for S&P 500 over the same period (also using adjusted for dividend numbers).
    - lotsofpulp 5mo ago
      For the previous 10 years, dividends reinvested, GME returned 14.59% per year, SP500 did 15.376% per year. Considering the much, much higher risk of owning a single stock, the risk adjusted return of SP500 is much higher than GME. https://dqydj.com/stock-return-calculator/ https://dqydj.com/stock-return-calculator/ https://dqydj.com/sp-500-return-calculator/ https://dqydj.com/sp-500-return-calculator/

saulapremium 5mo ago

I absolute abhor the man but I think this is silly. No doubt that he has had luck and help, but he is still a good businessman. He's certainly an asshole (almost certainly dark triad territory), but I think that can be a benefit when creating a business.

dragontamer 5mo ago
It isn't helping him in this fight vs Sam Altman, AI investments or the like.