Comment by bunderbunder

1 day ago

It’s slightly amazing how persistent the Elon hype is. Quite a few of those problems are at least partially due to own goals that Musk himself has been scoring.

I realize that some of it is just a cult of personality, and that part will be unusually sticky because of things like cognitive dissonance. But that can’t be all of it. My next best guess is a bunch of it is a whole bunch of institutional investors are privately thinking these companies are way too risky, but keep it to themselves because it’s not their money they’re putting on the line and taking a contrarian position would risk angering a presumably vocal subset of clients of unknown size. Which isn’t a great way to make yourself popular with your boss.

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bunderbunder

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brightball  1 day ago

If he had delivered Neuralink alone, the hype would be valid. Doing that...plus SpaceX, Tesla, Boring, etc.

The biggest knock on him is that he says something will happen at a certain time and then it comes later. Even the sub-$30k EV. Cybercabs cost < $30k.

  • archagon  1 day ago

    No, the biggest knock against him is how he caused hundreds of thousands of people in the third world to die from sudden cutoff of food and medicine. This will never be forgiven or forgotten.

    • FeepingCreature  12 hours ago

      No seriously, this actually didn't happen. That one website is a "model" and simply doesn't account at all for the fact that most of the critical parts of USAID were picked up by other US aid programs.

      It looked like it might happen for a bit! And it is quite bad of course that that could have happened! But it didn't.

      3 replies →

  • mahboi  20 hours ago

    Most people don't even pay attention to what he announces, myself included. It happens if/when it happens. I got on a plane and had fast internet for the first time thanks to Starlink, that's great. But when someone at work is telling me about his "FSD" car, sure, show me it going around the block while we sit in the back.

  • bunderbunder  20 hours ago

    All of those are debatable at best from a business perspective.

    Neuralink is still in clinical trials. So it hasn’t actually been delivered yet, and there’s no actual guarantee that it will be.

    From a certain perspective, SpaceX’s launch business was an effort to create an airline in space. And that’s exactly what they did, profit margins and all.

    Starlink is looking good right now, but its profits seem to be heavily propped up by crony capitalism, a system that the US electorate arguably voted against in a big way earlier this week. Plus, their up-and-coming competition was recently handed a gift beyond their wildest dreams, courtesy of Elon Musk, in the form of a clear demonstration that dependence on SpaceX is a major strategic liability.

    The AI bit, well… yeah.

    Tesla has had some past greatness, but, as I mentioned above, all of their recent misfortune is wholly or partially the fault of its own CEO. Worse, many of the minds more directly behind past successes have left the company. Investment is about future prospects, not past glory.

    Boring Company’s greatest commercial success thus far is the Las Vegas loop. That’s all that needs to be said about that.

  • rplnt  21 hours ago

    > and then it comes later

    Ignoring dozens if not hundreds of promises that never came. You can't wait forever.

sho  11 hours ago

> a whole bunch of institutional investors are privately thinking these companies are way too risky

What's that saying? "In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone"?