Comment by pas

It all depends on what the actual claim is. If Dropbox said look we did the math, did some ghetto-testing with mockups and an IT guy up-downloading your stuff in the background using ssh and sftp and hardcoding the filenames into todd.html and jane.html, and we think it'll be amazing, give muniz kthxbai. That's okay.

If did a demo with that method while claiming that it's the real thing running on 100 servers already with thousands of users ... well, that would be fraud.

What Musk communicated (said, implied, gesticulated, telepathed) at that demo regarding Solar Roof? He mentions production process, implying that it's real. He talks a lot about an integrated future, blabla. Is it a concept unveiling like what automakers do each year that then becomes nothing? Well, not exactly after all they take deposits for it. But "obviously" it's dumb. Having so many small tiles just kills cost efficiency. (Because every tile basically has a panel and needs a small connector, makes roofing slower, etc.)

I'm fairly sympathetic to the claim that all these startups are big piles of BS .. but at the same time it's not like they are so different from what other companies pull off as business-as-usual. See Google's demos that then go nowhere. See how phone and laptop makers over-promise and then constantly under-deliver, let's say with regard to battery capacity and life. Or game companies releasing trailers and doing demos at E3 and then years later the product is nowhere near finished and eventually the finished looks much worse.