Comment by tempsy
4 years ago
This interview from April 2019 was the thing that convinced me he was a fraud. https://www.truckinginfo.com/330475/whats-behind-the-grille-...
This gem right here:
> "The entire infotainment system is a HTML 5 super computer," Milton said. "That's the standard language for computer programmers around the world, so using it let's us build our own chips. And HTML 5 is very secure. Every component is linked on the data network, all speaking the same language. It's not a bunch of separate systems that somehow still manage to communicate."
This guy does not know what HTML is. What he has described is not what HTML would be used for.
And I'm supposed to believe he's some sort of mastermind behind some new age hydrogen/electric truck?
Have you listened to Jack Ma talk? He sounds like some kind of total moron in the panel discussion with Elon Musk. I know, you're thinking "It's not his first language. That's what it is" but go watch it yourself¹. The ideas he expresses seem completely unformed and make it look like he's not operating at a particularly high level.
But Alibaba is real. It's a real company doing real things and delivering real value. It's a giant success.
Now I'm not saying Nikola will be (maybe those shorts for 2022 are pretty cheap) but people speak like complete idiots and still run successful companies that they start.
¹ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3lUEnMaiAU
Here's a highlight: https://youtu.be/f3lUEnMaiAU?t=789
Alibaba is real and heavily funded by the CCP. After seeing that interview last year I lost all respect for Alibaba.
It became clear they (+ANT financial) exist only because the CCP allows them to exist with heavy funding.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/can-we-trust-alibabas-numb...
Yeah, if a CEO/director being a chronic bullshit artist always meant a company was fraudulent, I'm not sure how many legitimate companies we'd have left.
The only difference between Jack Ma and Elon in that interview is that Elon's bullshit sounds smart to us and Jack's doesn't. Every CEO's real job is to pander to their audience and hype up the company. That might mean repeating "HTML5 AI Encryption Blockchain" over and over again to roomfuls of investors and shareholders.
Yea the takeaway I had was that both of them were spewing some pretty stupid stuff, though Jack Ma's sounded more like propaganda.
Yeah, after that talk I was pretty skeptical Jack Ma was anything more than just a CCP figurehead or maybe friends with someone in the government?
He comes across as a complete idiot.
Maybe you don't need to be that smart to run a company like Alibaba, but I find that hard to believe - I suspect government protection and party favoritism plays a part.
When they are just a figurehead for a government-backed enterprise, they can be complete morons.
When you are the head of a revolutionary startup that's competing technologically with existing companies, you can't afford to be one.
Richard Branson would've been a much better example. He's massively dyslexic, can barely read, and openly admits that he didn't understand the difference between "net" and "gross" for the first couple decades of running his companies.
He was however a massively charismatic individual and an extremely good judge of character, so he was able to use these traits to sweet talk investors and hire people he knew he could trust to get the job done.
>When you are the head of a revolutionary startup that's competing technologically with existing companies, you can't afford to be one.
Of course you can, you hire people to understand those things for you and make them work. Do you think the bulk of innovation, design and execution comes from the CEO's own head? Not even Elon Musk is that integral to his companies or their output.
Extraordinary claims (That AliBaba was successful solely because the government of China is apparently pouring billions of dollars into it, making it literally impossible for it to do anything but succeed) require extraordinary evidence.
Their financials are public - please point out the line items that the CCP is bankrolling. And while you're at it, explain why it seems to be so altruistic as to be funneling national funds into a publicly traded company.
(I won't even ask for an explanation of why large US tech companies are, in your assessment, not backed by the government.)
There's a world of difference between "You need to be in the good graces of the government to operate", and "The government is operating you." Contrary to popular misconception, e-commerce, like most business in China is not a command economy, operated from some underground Poltibureau bunker, all for the glory of the sickle, the hammer, and the star.
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For me, this was sadly hilarious (https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-08-06/it-s-a...):
"More impressive is that Nikola’s revenue for the second quarter was very small ('immaterial,' Nikola actually calls it), just $36,000. Most impressive, though, is how they earned that revenue:
'During the three months ended June 30, 2020 and 2019 the Company recorded solar revenues of $0.03 million and $0.04 million, respectively, for the provision of solar installation services to the Executive Chairman, which are billed on time and materials basis. During the six months ended June 30, 2020 and 2019 the Company recorded solar revenues of $0.08 million and $0.06 million, respectively, for the provision of solar installation services to the Executive Chairman. As of June 30, 2020 and December 31, 2019, the Company had $3 thousand and $51 thousand, respectively, outstanding in accounts receivable related to solar installation services. The outstanding balance was paid subsequent to period end.'
'Solar installation projects are not related to our primary operations and are expected to be discontinued,' says Nikola, but I guess they are doing one last job, specifically installing solar panels at founder and executive chairman Trevor Milton’s house? It is a $13 billion company whose only business so far is doing odd jobs around its founder’s house."
Edit0: formatting.
The bigger issue here is that this man was able to convince "industry veterans" to give him massive amounts of money. You can see through him in a heart beat because you're technically savvy. Clearly the people running these automakers are not.
It doesn't surprise me in the slightest why he was able to convince deep pocketed "industry veterans" to fund him, and actually understanding the social dynamics at play is important for understanding society at large (and can be very helpful when it comes to making money).
There is a metric shit ton of pressure on these legacy automakers to compete with Tesla. Sure, you may think Tesla is a relatively small slice now, but the leaders at these companies are extremely scared of falling behind technologically to the point where they are uncompetitive. I'm quite sure a lot of people at GM were skeptical, but I bet a lot of them also did the subconscious calculation "What's worse for my career, losing out on a deal with an innovator like Nikola and falling even further behind, or going with Nikola, in which case if it fails we're not much worse off then we were originally?" Against this backdrop it's easy to see how a scammer can take advantage of this dynamic and even play legacy players off each other, e.g. "Well, you could choose not to invest in us, but then think how much further behind Tesla you'll be. And you know we're talking to Ford, too."
Seriously just watch any of the guys rants on YouTube, you don't have to be technically savvy to see through his bullshit. Watch any of his interviews on YouTube. I like this one with Jim Cramer trying to nail him down on his pre-sales number on the Badger and laughing at him later
https://youtu.be/OPhN8saJkAI?t=377
Amazingly tall pile of crap that guy is spewing. In the video he's touting their lack of product / development focus as a virtue and claiming that they can work on four or five projects (vehicles) more efficiently than one, despite having no viable vehicles. Maybe we should consider his premise: Nikola can fail to build four or five vehicles as well as they can fail to build one.
That was painful to watch. He sounds like a politician - talking non-stop and not answering a single question in the process.
There might not be many options for investors that want exposure to the EV market but missed the boat on Tesla. I'm sure plenty thought it could be the Lyft to Tesla's Uber.
It will really only fail when the money dries up. As long as they can keep raising money, they can keep the fantasy alive long enough to lure in other investors.
I mean you could google the guy and find the book he wrote _on running scams in NY_.
The domestic auto industry is a jobs program not a real business.
I can't tell if you're serious or trolling. Ford sold close to a million F-150s alone in 2019 (the best-selling vehicle in America), with the F-series line doing $42 billion in revenue on its own. The domestic auto industry is very much a real business with real revenue and real profitability.
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Which everyone should be made aware of, because it's worth asking how did it get that way, and how do we prevent other industries from suffering this fate.
It's been modern economic theory that has encouraged this stripping of US industry...unfortunately it's a lauded theory.
Money talks...even if it is BS, the world is full of it.
Before you downvote this, keep in mind that the founder comes from a Mormon background - perfect upbringing to be trained as a salesman
Another example of selling snake-oil ideas comes from the author of the book "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People":
"According to Clayton Christensen, The Seven Habits was a secular distillation of Latter-day Saint values." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Covey
sorry, what is the example of? Also, how is the Mormon background good for being a salesman?
They are required to do missionary work like a door to door salesman.
Imagine being trained like that from youth- you could sell anything. This comes from an anecdote from an ex-Mormon friend.
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"HTML5 Super Computer" lol, thats the best sequence of words i've heard this year
That's certainly the funniest bit, but "so using it lets us build our own chips" is the biggest head scratcher.
the ease of programming HTML5 frees up our engineers to move their efforts towards chip-design!
Many people feel the same way listening to Elon Musk talking about AI and self driving...
And yet every Tesla owner tells me that their car is just one update away from driving itself across the country.
Musk states that his company's intention is to advance computer vision to the point where it can safely drive a car, and then offer this technology with the sensors deployed in their current vehicle fleet.
Milton stated that using a very secure HTML5 supercomputer that's linked on the data network allows them to build their own chips.
These statements are not equivalent in what they imply about the speaker. It's not subtle.
Musk says a lot of silly things about areas of science and technology he knows nothing about. People who do know about those topics feel the same way about Musk as most of HN, a web-technologies focused forum, feels about Milton talking about HTML5.
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It's not the same: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hx7BXih7zx8
You can watch that talk and see the approach they're taking. Maybe you're more skeptical than they are about the near term possibility, but you can see that the work and progress is real.
The AGI risk is real too.
What Milton said doesn't make semantic sense, it's not a question of timelines.
https://intelligence.org/2017/10/13/fire-alarm/
I firmly believe that some parts of the AI community have a vast overestimation of their capabilities.
AGI is not 50 years away - it is unknowably far in the future. It may be a century, it may be a millenium. We just know far too little about the human mind to make any firm prediction - we're like people in Ancient Greece or 1800s England trying to predict how long it would take to develop technology to reach the moon.
We are at the level where we can't understand how the nervous system of a worm works in terms of computation. Emulating a human-level mind is so far beyond our capabilities that it is absurd to even imagine we know how to do it, "we just need a little more time".
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I don't understand why it's relevant to watch a video of someone who is not Musk as a comparison to Milton.
I'm not claiming that the Head of AI Research at Tesla has said stupid things (I don't think he has), I'm saying that Musk has said stupid and nonsensical things that don't make semantic or scientific sense, and in comparison to Milton their hucksterism is just a difference of degrees.
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> just one update away
What's the over/under on cold fusion before self-driving?
It used to be more fun before the search engines start pushing age over relevance, but searching for 'elon musk claims' is entertaining.
Self-driving first for sure, since cold fusion isn't thought to even be theoretically possible, and I think self-driving is likely to arrive sometime before "never," even if it's a long time from now. With the uptick in funding for vanilla/hot fusion, though, self-driving vs. hot fusion (Q>1) is actually a legitimately interesting question, I think. I'd probably still bet on self-driving, I guess? But I'd be less confident (and I don't think either is soon).
I got the HW3 hardware update in my MX a few weeks ago - and from what my car has demonstrated to me what it’s capable of - I sincerely believe Tesla will have driveway-to-driveway autonomy for simpler scenarios (e.g. suburbia and semi-rural areas, with clear road-markings) within two years.
I appreciate that what I just said comes with a huge caveat - and that probably 80% of the work will be hammering-down everything else - but consider that Google’s Waymo is already well-past that already.
If Tesla is planning to do self-driving entirely with vision systems, they are more than a decade away from a driveway-to-driveway autonomy unless you mean from your driveway to your next door neighbor's driveway, seeing as how they can't identify trucks on a highway, stalled objects on a roadway, or, per Consumer Reports, stop signs, traffic lights, or road markings on any road other than major highways and streets.
> And yet every Tesla owner tells me that their car is just one update away from driving itself across the country.
I just drove my Tesla half way across the country and back last week. And based on the performance of Autosteer and the neighboring car visualizations they're nowhere close to Level 5 self driving.
Love the car and am a big Tesla/SpaceX fanboy. But I won't believe it'll achieve Level 5 until I see it.
> The entire infotainment system is a HTML 5 super computer,
Should have added some blockchain while he was at it.
They're pursuing a patent for that, so he was reluctant to talk about it. The blockchains are embedded into HTML tags using proprietary, secure data attributes. It's hash encrypted using CSS3, which is the standard algorithmic formulation language used by all programmers to control how data is shared.
"At our new hospital, we're using stethoscopes," he said. "That's an industry-standard tool for doctors around the world. Because of that, we can perform advanced procedures, like hemorrhoidectomy and brain transplant."
I've known plenty of manager types that have a very little understanding of the technology involved with their product. A lot of times they try to parrot what their technical team is telling them. Some can be very good at it, other sound like idiots because they have little true understanding of the technology. But that's okay, since their true expertise is in putting together a company or organization that outputs a successful product. It requires being able to manage and inspire people to get the best from them. And countless other parts that I can't even imagine. It does not require a CEO to get too deep in the weeds of the technology. A CEO does not have to know everything, he just has to hire and manage the people that will do the parts he doesn't know. Technology has very little to do with that but expertise on how people work and function has everything to do with it.
BTW, they sound like idiots to the people that understand the technology but that's a small subset of all people. Most people have even less understanding than the CEO. So they get influence by his charm and finesse. What most people would call BS around here.
Actually - just the opposite.
Most people do not really know how HTML works, and nobody but technical people should really.
Or at least - they could make major mistakes in communication.
If he was 'my CEO' I would understand that he was trying to say 'Infotainment is a platform, built on extensible tech that everyone knows how to use' - this is fair.
It seems like Nikola is a fraud, but this isn't the red flag actually. This is standard miscommunication.
I agree this could be easily understood as a result of some internal talks where they switched platforms and he got a report saying "We don't need to rewrite the infotainment system, it's mostly HTML5, so we're all good even after we switched from X to the customised ARM foo". It's still stupid, but doesn't mean he's actively lying here.
I'm not convinced thats fraud but probably just "CEO bullshitter who only speaks in buzzwords in public" (referring to the interview). I also don't think anyone at GM (through whatever technical diligence they hopefully did) didn't bank on HTML5 as a chip-enablement strategy.
Wow that is just complete gibberish. I haven’t been plugged into these incidents and didn’t realize there were such issues. Is this an indictment of news media? I feel like I’ve mostly been fed vague but confidently positive news bites before this discussion.
At least he's talking about the infotainment system, and not an internal system or something where there's no conceivable use for HTML/JS.
I wouldn't care if you're building an actual website, calling something "an HTML5 super computer" is total bullshit in any context.
Can someone emulate a Cray using JS and HTML 5 please? I want to see this HTML 5 super computer.
> "so using it let's us build our own chips"
what is the connection between HTML5 and building your own chips?
That one’s pretty obvious: The custom quantum chips enable hardware-accelerated HTML5 and power the deep neural nets that drive carbon emissions to zero.
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Both are things that get non-tech savvy investors excited, apparently.
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They are both Venture Capital-strength buzzwords.
It's hard for me to wrap my head around time. Over 20 years ago the CxO of Sun came to one of the big automotive events and said a car is just a browser on wheels. I think he was selling coffee. Er Java? Been too long.
You think he's a fraud simply because he bullshitted his way through some computer sales pitch? In a way, I have a ton of respect for people willing to even try this kind of thing in public
If he could talk lucidly about things like HTML I'd think that lent more credence to the possibility he didn't have a clue about hydrogen
edit: for the downvoters, if you haven't seen one of these "bear thesis" articles before, understand you must do at least as much homework as the bear claims to have done before accepting anything you read. Of course Nikola is a dodgy company, but it's also a social phenomenon. That's the value in it for the likes of GM, and also for the average investor -- including the professionals. At one stage YouTube was the largest video piracy company on the planet before a larger company swallowed them up and cut deals to legitimize what they'd done. Meanwhile, everyone knew the brand. You can consider what's happening here to be something roughly comparable
You have a ton of respect for people who will lie through their teeth to make a sale?
Why should we not assume his HTML5 knowledge is roughly equivalent to his hydrogen car knowledge?
In another window I have a thesaurus open looking for a word that conveys only the subset of meanings of respect that don't intersect with approval, something that captures the fascination, the horror of the carnival barker personality and the way we are seduced and bamboozled by their spectacle of bullshit. I think we have to admit that we actually enjoy aspects of this seduction. We love listening to a raconteur, stories of a con man, but the rock star we love from a hundred feet back in the throng of the crowd, smells like their own urine up close. I think if we're going to find a way to build a society wide immune response against bullshit we need to be honest that we enjoy a performance, and a sure fire way to improve a performance is to unshackle it from the constraints of reality and integrity.
Would you withdraw your savings from a bank because the cashier didn't understand HTML 5? Why should we not assume operating a cash drawer is roughly equivalent to HTML 5 knowledge?
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Fair enough. But what kind of person lies about the existence of solar panels on their roof?
> Trevor claimed that Nikola’s headquarters has 3.5 megawatts of solar panels on its roof producing energy. Aerial photos of the roof and later media reports show that the supposed panels don’t exist.
I don't have respect for people that bullshit their way through situations that fraudulently entice investors to put their money into a company.
How do you feel about Elon?
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it's the cherry on top of everything else he's bullshitted through.
nothing about his background or experience gives any legitimacy to him being in a position of "electric truck CEO and mogul"