Comment by mr_mitm

Its hard to hold his DOGE claims against him. He ultimately didn't have control there and it sure seems like he was either lied to about what he was going to be allowed to do or had the rug pulled out from under him.

After the first few some responsibility begins shifting to those still believing him.

Investors know what's up. They want number to go up, therefore they "believe" him and the number goes up.

The map precedes the territory

Put that on your resumé and you'll easily land a cushy job in Washington.

There's a slash missing at the end.

I think they mean grift or even fraud, since they were definitely meant to attract investment.

Now excuse me while I go check on where my 2016 full-self-driving Tesla car. It was supposed to pick me up 9 years ago, something must have happened.

A statement is a lie if the person saying it knows it to be false. Not if the person hearing it disbelieves it.

What evidence is there for the 'dump' part?

Mr Musk is a strange fellow indeed, but he's not guilty of all the vices and sins. Just plenty enough of them.

To be "mere puff", the claim needs to be so obviously untrue that no reasonable bystander would suppose it to be meant literally.

But Musk often acts as if he does actually intend to be taken seriously. In the case of the current story, consider the marketing resources Tesla have poured into their previous "Battery Day" events and look at the press reaction; it's clear that at least some people believed that the claims stacked up.

A quick search of the hn archives for "4680" shows a similar picture. Yes, there were always some sceptical voices, but they were often shouted down as being from people motivated by an anti-Elon grudge. Nevertheless, the sentiment tended to be overwhelmingly positive with many posters actively reinforcing the hype.

Now, whether or not a self-selecting sample of hn posters can be seen as "reasonable bystanders" is certainly debatable - but it does seem that we're getting close to the point where Musk is going to have to start branding those who believe him as being exceptionally gullible in order to escape a charge of misleading advertising.

When you are making predictions about what you are going to do, "correctly" is spelled "honestly".

Somehow his company is worth ~1.6 trillion dollars, with most of that valuation being confidence in his predictions. He is predicting humanoid useful robots soon. Tesla's valuation defies reason

Yes, that's the problem. The fines for his actions should have been at least a hundred times greater, maybe a thousand times greater.

> Electric vehicles were the first types of cars invented.

Where is this claim coming from? I don't see that in the history of the automobile wiki [1], and given that the first early motorized carriages were a century before Ben Franklin flew a kite I have to assume they were electric vehicles.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_automobile

They were also mass produced before Tesla.

Nobody with any knowledge at all is claiming that Elon Musk invented electric cars.

The simple truth is that he made electric cars viable competitors to gas-powered cars. His genius is not that he invented them, it's that he profitably manufactured decently reliable cars for a price that lots of people found attractive.

You can try and dismiss it as "marketing," but things like the Gigapress and FSD/Autopilot are impressive technical achievements in their own right. Even more impressive is that he built up a new car company that didn't fold and has had the best selling car in the US for significant chunks of time.

I don't like the guy, I think that FSD is dangerous, and I will never buy a Tesla for as long as he's in charge, but it's crazy that so many people feel the need to discredit his achievements. Sure, he benefited from selling carbon credits and EV subsidies, but if it were such an easy thing to do why did it take so long for anyone else to sell a good EV?

Nissan made a golf cart with an ecobox car cabin.

Likewise, but those were famously slow. Might have been expandable into other delivery vehicles, but neither the batteries nor the motors were up to being commuter vehicles… well, possibly electric bicycles back then, the European Blue Banana* was better positioned than much of the world to commute by bike, but not much more than that in performance or geography until much more recently.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Banana

The Lancet[1] forecasted Musk's 'bit of a jerk' elimination of USAID[1] will cause a death toll that puts him around 10x that of Pol Pot.

> Projections suggest that ongoing deep funding cuts—combined with the potential dismantling of the agency—could result in more than 14 million additional deaths by 2030, including 4·5 million deaths among children younger than 5 years.

[1] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

Traditionally it’s TWO minutes of hate at a selected government target after your morning exercise program. To do otherwise is wrongthink

I’ve got as much of a distaste for Musk as anybody else these days, but SpaceX’s methodology has if nothing else netted them velocity and turnaround times that no other company or governmental space agency has been able to hold a candle to thus far, and do it with a very low failure rate. They’re clearly doing something right.

Weird hill to die on in 2025

If you had said this in 2015, we would be nodding along

tbh, it still isn't economically feasible. spacex 'cheated' to achieving reuse by just making the the entire plumbing and engine assembly bolt-on to the lower stage on F9 and they just replace that every time one is 'reused'. to my knowledge, they still haven't reused an engine without either replacing the nozzle, turbopumps or both, which are so expensive that reuse might actually cost them more money in the end for the benefit of faster turnaround times in years where launches are booked heavily.

There is no “subject to interpretation”. The costs they charge for launches are lower than any other provider by a significant margin. And fundraising docs have shown many times that the Falcon launches make money and Starlink was just starting to make money about 1.5 years ago.

> What we clearly know is that using software development methodologies to building critical hardware is as a bad idea as it sounds.

This methodology is what provides high speed, low latency internet to the South Pole and every other spot on earth allowed by regulatory.

If the input to the weather forecast is mostly /dev/random, then yes, that is called a lie. There is a very big difference between modelling chaotic systems and providing random noise.

Weather forecasts are a best-effort.

CEOs should have a reasonable grasp of what's possible for their team on a given short/medium timeline.

It won't be perfect but should be ballpark.

Elon and those like him make these statements with no reference to realistic project delivery timelines, business capacity or anything else - despite having all of that information readily available.

That's not a best guess, it's making shit up.

Waiting for Godot’s robotaxi