Comment by Trd
9 years ago
Proven what? His main claim of glory, Tesla, still hasn't achieved what he built the company for: making EVs mainstream. Rather than the ecological revolution he pretends it to be (his focus on climate change), it is still nothing but an expensive toy for the wealthy. Not exactly selling at the levels where we could talk about making a change for the planet.
Maybe you're referring to SpaceX in proving skeptics wrong? We have yet to see if that company ever becomes profitable. Reusing rockets is not what made people skeptical as much as pretending it'd make financial sense to do.
Most of his other popular pet projects are even more pie-in-the-sky. Neuralink? That's nothing but talk. Hyperloop? not a single prototype built in the real world, in a real location. OpenAi sounds like what a conspiracy theorist would come up with.
I think this crazy tunnel thing Elon just announced looks horrible, but the moment you claim that Tesla and SpaceX aren't doing anything special is where it becomes pretty obvious that you don't know what you're talking about.
Tesla sells high tech luxury vehicles that, as yet, aren't mainstream, and there are several road bumps to overcome before getting there. To laud Musk's success today to the point of proving success on his future products is premature. He hasn't completed his initial goals -- making electric mainstream and space flight an enterprise.
Not saying it isn't possible or what he has achieved isn't great. Just saying his existing successes don't prove what he's proposing will succeed, since, his new goals are as big or bigger than his initial as-yet-incomplete goals.
> as yet, aren't mainstream
Maybe it takes more than 5 minutes to make all cities capable of powering electrical cars then competing with the existing car market? He's already built a successful product, has successful competitors, prevented the 2000's era proprietary cell phone charger fiasco from happening again. It's a little too late to be skeptical.
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> aren't mainstream
Citation needed. I see teslas multiple times daily. In my book that counts as mainstream.