[SimianSci]

The Goalpost shift continues, If elon were working for me, I would have fired him for having never delivered on any of his projects.

Hyperloop > Neuralink > Self-Driving Cars > Robotaxi fleets > Personal Robots > Orbital Datacenters > [Insert next]

[reisse]

> If elon were working for me, I would have fired him for having never delivered on any of his projects.

Never? For the sheer amount of moonshot bets he's doing, his track record would make any VC jealous. Zip2, PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX, Grok/xAI.

[kayamon]

World's Best At Surfing A Temporary Hyperinflation Wave is not a life goal to really be proud of tbh.

[riku_iki]

> Never? For the sheer amount of moonshot bets he's doing, his track record would make any VC jealous. Zip2, PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX, Grok/xAI.

not never, but xAI is not clear if successful, and others were bootstrapped 10 years ago, and not clear if they need mask at this point.

[bamboozled]

He also purchased Tesla once there was prototypes etc, not to say he didn't do anything good there or whatever (I have no idea what he really did) but yeah, people like to pretend he did all these things on his own or something.

[tw04]

>Zip2

I guess props to scamming Compaq into making a large investment that didn't pan out. He did personally make money so I guess win for him.

>In an effort to woo investors, Elon Musk built a large casing around a standard computer to give the impression that Zip2 was powered by a supercomputer.

>PayPal

Huh? He didn't found Paypal, his company was acquired by Paypal. You might as well give him credit for eBay while you're at it. Paypal released their first digital wallet in 1999. They acquired x.com (and Musk) in 2000. Paypal itself was then acquired by eBay in 2002.

>Tesla

Investor, not founder.

>SpaceX

Yup, props here.

>Grok/xAI

Hasn't made a penny, no signs it had any path to profitability, which is why it was shoved into Space-X to cover his personal losses.

[TehCorwiz]

Hey now. Huperliop was designed to scuttle California’s light rail project. Which it did. Mission accomplished.

[WatchDog]

I think you mean "California High-Speed Rail", not light rail.

Light rail, generally refers to urban rail, "trams".

[ddtaylor]

Still failed and missed every projection. I think he said we would be on Mars too?

[jujube3]

California's light rail still exists, as does California High-Speed Rail, which is not light rail.

[jdminhbg]

This is the funniest conspiracy theory.

[adastra22]

What are you talking about?

[qaq]

hmm Tesla shipped millions of cars SpaceX launches 90% of space payloads, Starlink is working well. Thats hard to categorize as never delivered on any of his projects

[iandanforth]

The crucial thing is that Tesla's valuation has the hype projects baked in. The fact that it never delivered self driving or a robotaxi fleet and is now being saved solely by an import ban on Chinese EVs means that any success he had with Tesla is now an illusion.

[JumpinJack_Cash]

The projects promised to be life altering for all mankind, they ended up being not even life altering for super rich Americans considering that Teslas are just EVs which without FSD are just regular cars with a different propellent that were made for political purposes and virtue signaling

The EV revolution has always been something almost dystopic : Trillions of dollars spent in order to not have the slightest amount of quality of life improvement, if anything a worse quality of life because you buy an EV that you cannot use 24/7/365 whereas you can an ICE car for much less .

As soon as something kinda elegant and hopeful as far as collective quality of life improvement is concerned (AI/ChatGPT) came around.....the whole green/EV revolution rightfully went out the window

If Musk was this genius you guys make him to be at 50 and with all the capital he burned he should have at least one company that if you disappeared the world would look drastically different, like if you disappeared Microsoft or Apple or Exxon or Aramco or Amazon or IBM....the world would come to a screeching halt.

Disappear one of Musk companies and everything would be the same as he's always involved in these sort of aspirational companies which have this great vision always 5 years into the future that never materialize into anything tangible or that improves the quality of life like the company I mentioned earlier

[almosthere]

The Starlink achievement alone is one of the most insane projects ever attempted and works really well.

[alexc05]

According to google Tesla has shipped 8 million cars total since inception. It is valued at 1.32 Trillion as of today. Which is roughly $165,000 per shipped vehicle.

[bpodgursky]

Lol this is why you aren't a VC. Even if every single Musk venture failed other than SpaceX, the investments would have paid off wildly well. You aim for the tails not the median.

[jatora]

Shift your goalposts over to Google if your only argument is pointing out projects that dead end and ignoring the ones that don't. So embarrassing.

[yibg]

Google has a PE ratio of 34. Kinda expensive but reasonable in today's climate. Tesla has a PE ratio of almost 400. It's a meme stock at this point.

[GMoromisato]

I'm amazed at this kind of thinking. I get it, obviously, and it's not uncommon, but still.

Elon Musk has already revolutionized three industries:

1. EVs: Before Tesla, no one thought electric cars could be a mass-market product. And even today, the Model 3 and Model Y are at the top of almost all sales lists.

2. Orbital Launch: No one expected Space X to succeed. What does a software guy know about real engineering? But today, re-usable rockets are the way of the future, and Space X is at least 5 to 10 years ahead of any other company.

3. Satellite Communications: Every single major military power is trying to deploy their own version of Starlink. Before Starlink, 50 satellites was considered a big constellation. Starlink has 8,000 satellites and they are literally launching hundreds every month.

I know it's impossible to prove a counter-factual, but I'm convinced that none of these three would have happened without Elon. No other Western car company has (even now) produced a profitable EV. No other space company has prices as low as Space X. No one even has the capability to build a Starlink competitor (not yet at least). Without Elon pushing these projects, they simply would not have happened or would have happened decades later (after China or someone else beat us to it).

Even his not-yet-successful projects are far beyond most other companies:

Boring Company has actually built tunnels and passengers are actually riding it. No one else is even trying.

Neuralink has actually helped patients.

Tesla FSD actually does work (I use it all the time), and even if Waymo is ahead, Tesla is easily in second place.

I 100% get the hatred for Elon Musk. His political positions are absolutely worth criticizing and I cringe most of the time he tweets. But to deny his business and engineering ability is just motivated reasoning.

Such illusions are ultimately self-defeating. The more opposed one is to Elon Musk (in business or politics) the more important it is to see his capabilities clearly.

[rmccue]

> Boring Company has actually built tunnels and passengers are actually riding it. No one else is even trying.

Boring Company bought an existing tunnel boring machine (TBM), and used it to dig a car tunnel. Their only “innovation” in terms of any cost savings is to dig smaller tunnels - which we already knew could be done (tunnel cost grows with diameter), and which we don’t do for good reasons (capacity, emergency egress).

The branding and marketing exercise was excellent though.

[queenkjuul]

Business ability, ok. Engineering? I've seen no evidence to date musk has engineered anything in his life, unless you count zip2

[Sparyjerry]

Don't forget that Musk also founded Open AI (ChatGPT).

[claaams]

In a way, its kind of cool to see how robber barons work in real time in our generation. Its also insanely depressing as they will systematically enshittify and extract as much wealth from society as is possible.

[mrguyorama]

I don't actually think the Robber Barons in the 1920s had people going out of their way to defend them and insist they had special knowledge.

The New Deal happened with massive popular support because people did not like the Barons, and wanted to stop them and actually have a life worth living.

It only took like 30 years of suffering.

[dubeye]

he seems to return to his investors quiet effectively, which is ultimately what a CEO has to do to attract more capital to build stuff.

And I have a Tesla and starlink and I'm quite happy with the level of autonomy the car has, so he has delivered on some level

[tuhgdetzhh]

Yeah, but there are enough people to buy the hype.

[henry2023]

The guy also was super excited to go rap3 some k1ds in the island. Gladly he also failed at this.