Semi economics, reliability, capabilities, charging network and capabilities, and production/delivery. (“Suicide” for all other forms of freight including rail, yet asked the government for $100m to build 9 of the chargers which happen to not feature the promised solar capability)
Cybertruck specs, price, and production/delivery time (500 mile range, construction and materials, and really… “bulletproof” because it stops the weakest slowest softest round…)
Roadster specs and production/delivery time (Rocket boosters, impossible range, etc)
Robo Taxi concept (Your current Telsa will make you $30k per year and last 1 million miles as a fully autonomous taxi)
“In two years we will be making cars without steering wheel or pedals”
Mars mission (pretty much everything related to this)
Promised Starlink performance upgrades that never came
“Brake pads on a Tesla literally never need to be replaced for lifetime of the car.”
“Tesla AWD is dual motor, so you can fully drive the car even if one breaks”
Lied about his lack of censorship with Twitter (Dozens of censored individuals and publications)
Solar Tiles “reveal” and controversy
Worth noting, a lot of the lies regarding product capabilities were explicitly claims of things that could be done “today” not limited to promised future capabilities.
Totally appreciate that. I decided to just jump into the list and links here as a video instead of typing things up as I went through… first because it’s faster, and second because I wanted to kind of capture myself going through this for later evaluation.
I enjoyed the video a lot, Amal. Thank you for being a well grounded individual.
It’s also worth noting that things like liability, accounting, taxes, and other legal factors affect many decisions in many ways that most people don’t understand.
Also, thanks for reminding me of the Osborne effect:
Also, I’ve never had a gas car that delivered on the range. And the estimate that’s displayed on the dash varies depending on the day of the weak as the traffic and your schedule change. Although when I lived in Bogota those estimated were pretty stable, mainly because the traffic of that city is terrible… Unsurprisingly, many private planes will give you a better gas mileage than a small car in Bogota.
The inability for people to devise and apply proper scientific method and variable isolation to experiment is the same intellectual / emotional deficiency behind being unable to tell the difference between blind support of a person and being supremely unhappy with the lack of exactness and thoroughness of the arguments against them.
I’m happy to accept any well reasoned and demonstrated arguments against Musk. If you want to point to his childishness or immaturity or unprofessionalism, I think those are all well-worn paths that have easily proven themselves true. Where things get murky for me is people starting to call his business dealings “straight up fraud” or claim that any of the advances these businesses have brought to their fields are all built on lies. That’s where I think people need to separate their feelings about the man from the results of his efforts.
I will start out by saying I don’t like Elon Musk, and I don’t think he is stupid.
However I agree with Amal. Elon is a very public person and I believe that is why so much love or hate gets directed toward him.
First, If we talk about product shortcomings. He may have over promised specs, given incorrect timelines, never delivered features, or maybe he outright purposely lied in product demos or interviews. However name a household name car company, computer company, or any major publicly traded company that has not done an equivalent thing. Elon is just always putting himself in the public eye to be the face of whatever that drama is.
Secondly, Elon is (as far as we know) just one person. When discussing the successes or failures of a company with hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of people, he is the face, but he is not the make it or break it for each product or feature.
Third, Outrage is a powerful emotion. Anytime his name is blasted into the air over “Musk lied here, Musk failed on this, or Musk is a big dummy”. This prevents him from falling into irrelevance. I fully believe he purposely uses outrage to his benefit.
Again I personally do not like the guy, but I believe, aside from being constantly in the spotlight, his companies dealings are not appreciably different from most other publicly traded companies.
Throughout Isaacson’s book there are occasions where Musk demands something of his engineers, then asks for a timescale.
They say stuff like: “NASA develops a part like that in 100 days”
EM: “Ridiculous! What’s the best you can do?”
Them: “If you give us a higher budget and more resources and everything goes without a hitch we might get it down to 50…?”
EM: “You should be ashamed of yourselves. You’re fired! (indicating someone who he has identified as the problem) and do it in 10!”
Some get fired. Some can’t take it and quit and the poor souls who are left get it done in 40! - Rarely as good as his impossible demands but often far beyond what they thought they were capable of and always way faster than the competition.
I too think that he believes his own hype (especially as he’s saying it) but whether he does or not, the numbers don’t lie: like Jobs, his reality distortion field yields astounding results.
My grandfather was a high-ranking commander in WWII and in peacetime had immense success in a wide variety of ventures but was a bad husband and father. At his funeral a long line of service men lined up to shake the family’s hands and tell us how they would have thrown themselves on a grenade for him etc and how lucky we must have felt to be so close to the great man.
Reading about Musk gives me the same uncomfortable feeling.
But then again, Musk and my grandfather achieved more than I will if I live a 100 lifetimes so… … there’s that.
“Maybe every single incredible thing in human history was done with slaves,” he says. “You go, ‘Well, how did they build those pyramids?’ ‘Well, they just threw human death and suffering at them till they were finished.’”
Yes, although the idea of the pyramids being built by slaves came from a misunderstanding by an ancient Greek historian (Thucydides? Herodotus?) and has been fairly thoroughly debunked. It’s now thought that some of the free men working there were even people who walked away from a comfortable existence to help create something for the glory of their Pharaoh.
Your point still stands though because I imagine that those working at Tesla and Space X are not there because they can’t find good engineering jobs. They put up with his crap to be a part of his vision and I’m sure you’d find a good number of them willing to “fall on a grenade” for him.
Have you been exploring the more recent idea that the pyramids were actually giant chemical factories? It’s fascinating because unlike the idea of them being giant tombs with bizarre passages and vents for no reason, there is physical evidence in various pyramids of large scale chemical production still detectable today… and suddenly all those odd chutes and weird vents start to have practical and even mundane use cases and explanations.
I’m still not convinced current humanity is not the first of it’s kind to live on this planet. There were other iterations that progressed and eventually died out starting the cycle all over.
That premise reminds me of the Revenger Series by Alastair Reynolds, but way in the future. A new “occupation” or sentient species inhabits a solar system but then dies out, and a new one pops up a few hundred thousand years later, then it dies out, and the cycle continues.
Unless they purposely erased all trace of themselves I’m pretty confident there would be some evidence of metal tools, and if there aren’t metal tools then why would we even consider them a civilization.
