I believe this article completely ignores the product side of the story.
Elon doesn't pitch, he builds. His products are significantly better than market alternatives, with a steady momentum of improvement over time.
In the unofficial biography there's the story of how Tesla pulled an unlikely funding from Daimler. The Daimler executives visiting Tesla were unimpressed, skeptical and bored to death by the PowerPoints. Then the Tesla team took them for a ride in the electrified Smart they had built in a hurry. All the executives stepped out of it with a smile. The check arrived later. It was about the product, not the "save the earth" narrative.
My cognitive dissonance is strong when it comes to Elon. I have trouble sometimes reconciling the obvious flaws in his character on the one hand (though none of us are without flaws) and his extraordinary achievements on the other.
He can be a bit of a dick, yes. He exaggerates, yes.
He's also in my view one of the most talented and inspirational entrepreneurs of our generation.
I don't see how people can call him an outright fraud with a straight face when you look at what he has delivered through Tesla and SpaceX.
But he seems to elicit strong polarised opinions. And I get it. Lot's of noise about FSD, his constantly slipping timelines etc.
He might be a very effective marketer and manager, but he gets credit for so so much more than that. Like he singlehandedly made electric cars a thing. It's the Great Man theory of history.
Even then, effective marketing are often lies, so why value effective marketing? Effective management is so often toxic, so why value effective management? As far as I can tell, he's full of BS and his employees are treated poorly, so I really don't care so much that he's first to market.
This is the sort extreme polarised view I was referring to. All I can say is NASA doesn't agree with you on this.
The problem is, if you go straight to "he's full of BS" it just kills all sensible debate. He's clearly not full of BS. He's delivering astronauts to the Space Station via his "startup". This is not something someone "full of BS" achieves.
You're misunderstanding what I mean. Very uncharitably, if you think I somehow missed the fact he's delivering astronauts to the ISS and delivering cars. For god's sake, I agreed with you that he's very effective! You're seeing a much more "extreme polarized" statement that I wrote.
I'm not saying every single thing he says is BS, like he's going around saying the sky is green and up is down. Just that he says a whole lot of shit that isn't true also.
He can be an impressive engineer and entrepreneur while also being a jerk. I think it's ok to condemn his behaviors when they're out of line while also admiring the progress him and his companies have made in the industries they've targeted.
I feel like I've seen this before. A man is a relentless and masterful self-promoter, encourages a very public cult of personality, and puts out what are broadly considered superior products from his companies. He's also an egotistical prick.
I think it’s political tribalism more than anything else? It’s become more clear after this SNL thing.
On Twitter people on the left claim vaguely that Elon is bad and why is SNL doing this etc.
People on the right say Elon is great and SNL is normally unfunny.
In the former case I think it’s just because people associate Elon with the right for some reason.
The latter is easier to understand since a lot of SNL’s humor is explicitly political (not in a bad way imo).
Part of me wonders if the irreverent tweets were an intentional way to broaden his appeal. He needed EVs to go from “liberal” Prius symbols about the environment to cool.
That’s a Herculean task when you think about it. Even now there are still coal rolling truck drivers yelling at EVs, but the sentiment has definitely changed in a positive way.
He did this without having to embrace trump (unlike Thiel for instance).
I think his biggest miss was on covid, but he seems to agree that he was wrong.
I suspect a part of the left dislike is also around the progressive anti-billionaire/anti-capitalist sentiment, it makes Elon an easy “enemy”.
Putting all this aside and looking at what he’s building - it’s an exciting time to be alive. Most companies are fairly dull doing fairly dull things. Elon takes huge risks to try to pull the future down earlier. For the most part, he succeeds.
I think Elon's association with the right is largely due to his dudebro persona. He's what you get if you gave your average Rogan listener billions of dollars, a deep well of conviction, and an exceptional mind.
Among the political commentariat on the left, this kind of person is a Neanderthal that should be relegated to the dustbin of history.
For a lot of people on the outside of that demographic, he's just a fun, brilliant, if occasionally douchy guy who's way less out of touch than his billionaire contemporaries, and actually works to build neat things.
> “ For a lot of people on the outside of that demographic, he's just a fun, brilliant, if occasionally douchy guy who's way less out of touch than his billionaire contemporaries, and actually works to build neat things.”
Yeah - this is basically my take, and stated better than I did in my comment.
It is more that Elon does not associate himself with fashionable left wing causes. No kneeling photo-ops in SpaceX headquarters, no programs tailored to recruit specifically non-Asian non-whites etc.
In contemporary culture, that is enough to be considered right wing. Neutrality slowly ceased to be an option.
There are literally photo ops in spacex hqs! And a very publicized program dedicated to hiring engineers of color, and women. Whatever you might think of spacex, for the aerospace industry its batshit insane left wing (in this case mostly because of Gwynn Shotwell)
> I suspect a part of the left dislike is also around the progressive anti-billionaire/anti-capitalist sentiment, it makes Elon an easy “enemy”.
He IS an easy enemy in this regard, not only to the left. All his (mis)behaviour, naming his child like that, manipulating currency rates through tweets, that's not exactly what average people could afford. If he didn't fit this stereotype of billionaire, I'm sure he would be liked more.
The child name thing seemed more likely Grimes than Elon?
Even so I just don’t think these things are a big deal? I also don’t agree with the anti-billionaire/anti-capitalist sentiment though.
It’s just odd to me given how much he’s done to aid the transition to EVs and renewable energy. I guess it’s not a huge surprise, people are wildly inconsistent around tribal issues.
I didn't realize how good Teslas had gotten until I had the chance to spend significant time in one. Their insane acceleration was always apparent, but they've gotten really good in other ways as well.
They've had a chance to do a clean sheet rethinking of cars, and it works wonderfully well. If you have your phone on you, you just walk up to the car and the door is unlocked and on by the time you touch it. There's no "start" button, you just press the brake, push the mode stalk to drive or reverse, and go. When you walk away, the car locks itself silently and turns off. Depending on whose key it depends, the seat, steering wheel, and mirrors are adjusted by the time you sit down.
There's no "idling" to keep the AC on, so there's no guilt about doing it. They've recently added a very efficient heat pump that shares loops with the battery so the heat doesn't drain much, either. We spent an hour in the car with AC on recently, it used about 1 mile of range.
I thought I'd hate the touchscreen controls, but what I didn't realize was that you generally don't need to use them while driving. Wipers and climate are automatic and work well, so there's no real need to adjust them. The voice control is incredibly good, and seems to have access to almost every non-driving setting. Press a button on the steering wheel, and speak "Set wipers to auto", "I'm cold", "Play Spanish Moon by Little Feat", "Navigate home". They all work as you'd expect.
Jury is still out on "autopilot", lane following and dynamic cruise control are fine, but the onscreen world representation (cars, especially) is very jittery. I guess not too surprising, it's a DNN making guesses about the state of the world, but I'm surprised there's not a more persistent context vector between states. If it's very sure about a car being there in frames 1-10, it should really not expect that car to just blip out of existence in frame 11.
But overall, I'm extremely impressed, and I think I'll have a hard time going back to cars by traditional automakers. The impression is of a holistic design that's extremely well integrated, rather than the impression of a hodge podge of poorly integrated new and old systems that I've gotten with any car with an "infotainment" system that I've ever used.
I have been driving two Teslas over the last few years. I find that their voice recognition to be roughly 75-85% accurate.
More important, the manuals for the cars have not correctly described operation of voice commands for over a year. This speaks volumes to the software culture at Tesla. If you can't make the code conform to the documentation, you really can't trust the code.
I've had my Model X for almost three years now. I find the voice control to be almost completely unusable. Seems to be something about my voice, though I have a fairly typical American accent so I'm not sure what. I demonstrated the issue to a technician when I took it in for unrelated service, thinking it might be a faulty microphone, but it worked fine for him.
Definitely one of the most disappointing features of the car, which I generally love driving.
Nothing that the users do will correct a company culture that actually has the wrong way to operate the car described in its manuals. This is the kind of communication that pervades the company, top to bottom. I don't know if they fail to understand how their cars work, or if they deliberately exaggerate.
Ah I thought that you meant the commands weren’t listed. What are they incorrectly describing? I’ve seen some other examples of this (notably, the getting started tutorials mention getting to the manual via a Tesla T at the top of the touchscreen, which has gone missing).
Model X Owners Manual October 2020 (2020.44) manual, page 53 -- and the corresponding page in the Model S Owners Manual. Tesla changed the operation of their voice command button around December of 2019. The manual describes two ways to signal a complete command has been vocalized -- but only one truly works. Since the 'update notes' are extremely sparse, there was never a hint in the car's instrument cluster explanation of the update, that Tesla had removed the protocol for invoking the voice commands.
If Tesla will 'forget' to tell you that a feature is removed, or changed, then expect similar behavior around edge conditions for FSD if it ever materializes. For example, a number of different protocols could be added, tried, removed revolving around contention at 4-way stop signs. If the update notes are silent on FSD adopted behavior, a lot of annoyance and potential hazards will be created.
Have you actually driven new comparably priced cars by "traditional automakers"? There's not many things where Tesla is actually significantly ahead Audi, BMW and Mercedes.
It’s hard to give a fair evaluation of whether something is good when there is no suitable comparison.
The rest of the car industry is starting to get a clue and catch up, but the Model S had no comparable competition when it came out. It wasn’t like trading a few dollars or features for a Lexus vs. the same class of Mercedes, the Model S created its own class.
And SpaceX is the same story. It vastly changed the space launch landscape, and isn’t done yet. Falcon 9 has no real competition until Vulcan has a successful launch. Falcon Heavy’s only competition is Delta IV Heavy, which is at the end of its life and all remaining launches are booked. Starship and Super Heavy could maybe be compared to SLS, but that’s kind of insulting when you consider the budget and track record of both programs.
I guess my point is that while Elon does over-promise and doesn’t have a perfect hit rate, the main products have still really embarrassed the established players in each industry.
Vulcan and Falcon 9 does not compete in the same league. Vulcan exists as a backup choice for the US government to have guaranteed access to space. All commercially relevant features regarding reusability to get the costs even close to Falcon 9 have been shelved for years. For example the "SMART Reuse" they touted when announcing the rocket.
Yeah it’s really good. Yes, he also exaggerates (or more accurately I think is too ambitious about timelines).
It makes him miss sometimes, but it also is the reason SpaceX is where it is and they can turn around a rocket insanely quickly.
He sets crazy goals and even their “failures” are still 10x better than the rest of the market.
His plan for the company’s future is clear. The roadster -> S -> 3 worked, building out the charger network worked, the other vehicles and best-in-class software were really a bonus.
During all of this the competition and the press ranged from ignoring them to directly hostile.
People complained about why charging was less viable than gas for years, Tesla built out the charging network and fixed it.
Dealerships in the US fought for their rent seeking protections and local power - tesla fought them and won.
I think when nearly everyone is driving an EV within the next 20 years, people will look back on that NYT story where they intentionally killed the battery so they could have a cover story of a model S on a tow truck and will recognize it for what it was.
Those self-landing Falcon rockets don't impress you? Those capabilities sounded like exaggerated concepts not too long ago. Tesla cars and solar -- truly helping humanity move from fossil fuels (truly like in reality, at large scale), and now StarLink... Yeah, I'd say his outcomes are pretty good.
Musk makes Jobs and Gates look like under-achievers.
I've watched a decent amount of Jobs interviews, and I think you are down-playing the importance of this effect. He was a jerk, but he could spot talent, feverishly go after it, and then allow it to shine by giving it some of the most impactful problems that humanity is facing. Somehow he was able to wield a big company like most people could only handle small companies.
I don't know how many people have this skill, and you first require to have a ton of capital at hand to make use of it, but of the people in the world who have that capital this skill seems rather rare.
Quite. When he said on SNL "I re-invented electric cars", I thought yes, you and 1000s of very smart engineers at Tesla did, not you alone.
The leaders at the top of these companies get way too much credit for "having the vision". The vision too mostly likely came from many individuals who are not in the limelight and don't have the connections nor the cash.
Musk otherwise comes across as vulgar and insecure.
I used to get bothered by this as well, but you’ve got to get over it. Most of the time the thousands of people don’t want to be in the limelight and it is better for the product/company to have a good and smart leader out there touting it without saying every single time that actually they didn’t do that much and Bill and Mary and Chloe and 500 other people actually did all the work.
Look, we all know Musk and other CEOs didn’t invent these products/ideas on their own but storytelling is a big part of leadership.
Those rockets impress me, but Elon Musk did not construct them. The NASA (and also the soviet union) managed to do equally great things without someone like him in past.
> Tesla cars -- truly helping humanity move from fossil fuels
It would be much more effective to use bicycle and trains wherever possible, and drive small cars otherwise. But wait ... that's not luxurious enough. Saving the world is just an excuse for cool cars.
> and now StarLink
... to make the last corner of the world addicted to the internet and pay money to Musk.
The true achievement is not the capability of the rockets, it is the huge reduction in cost compared to government contracts. This is even excluding the reusability.
The development costs for Falcon 9 v1.0 were approximately US$300 million, and NASA verified those costs. If some of the Falcon 1 development costs were included, since F1 development did contribute to Falcon 9 to some extent, then the total might be considered as high as US$390 million.[14][2]
NASA also evaluated Falcon 9 development costs using the NASA‐Air Force Cost Model (NAFCOM)—a traditional cost-plus contract approach for US civilian and military space procurement—at US$$3.6 billion based on a NASA environment/culture, or US$$1.6 billion using a more commercial approach.[15][14]
We were never talking about costs, we were talking about how visionary Elon Musk is. However, while it's great if money is saved, again: is it really the achievement of Elon Musk, or would any private company be able to hold down costs?
"would any private company be able to hold down costs?"
Most space startups died without ever reaching orbit. One of the reasons why SpaceX has such a reputation is precisely that it stands so far apart from its competition.
You figure Tesla would be the in the world's top 10 companies by market cap today if Musk hadn't invested and run it, and the company was still run my Marc Tarpenning and Martin Eberhard?
I mean...it's hard to prove a negative, but just to mention one of the tens of critical moments along the way, I have a hard time seeing how someone less ruthless than Musk would have saved them from bankruptcy in 2008.
Another obvious juncture was the whole thing about building a battery factory costing more than the company's market cap a few years prior, doubling the world's battery production capacity...
This is simply a myth being propagated to detract Musk's early involvement in Tesla. It simply would not be the Tesla we know today without his involvement.
Musk simply led all funding rounds up to series C, was employee number 4, chairman of the board and took an extremely active role in the company before becoming the CEO. He and the first five employees are "co-founders" agreed to in court by Eberhard which is the one of the guys you are talking about.
A lawsuit settlement agreed to by Eberhard and Tesla in September 2009 allows all five (Eberhard, Tarpenning, Wright, Musk and Straubel) to call themselves co-founders.[11]
Thanks for pointing out he had to go to court and buy out the original founders to be called a co-founder.
I absolutely agree he has been instrumental to Tesla’s success since he joined as employee number 4 and then took over, but he didn’t start the company and the statement that nobody was interested in or working on electric cars is factually untrue though nobody else managed to bring them to the mass market before Musk.
over 100,000 Toyota Prius were sold in 2016. Tesla is likely to be the top company in the electric vehicle space for quite some time. but to act like they invented the market and no one else was working on it is just silly. it's like saying that Bill Gates invented computers
I'm not being literal when I say "nobody was working on electric cars".
If you need to me to clarify it: the scale and rate of progress in EV was severely accelerated by Tesla. ICE auto companies had no incentive to develop electric. The space was unprofitable, had many technical challenges.
I love trains, and would love to see proper high speed rail in the US, but let's be honest, that's primarily a political problem, and I don't expect to see it within the next 30 years.
Yes but they were working with first of its kind technology from ~50years ago and could launch 7 astronauts. That it was expensive doesn't make SpaceX first.
The cost is literally the entire point of reusability, though. In case of Space Shuttle, the reusability of orbiter module achieved very little - between inspections and fixups of the orbiter, rebuilding SSME, building new external tanks, and expensive refurbs of the SRBs (where it was arguably cheaper to build new ones - a dip in salt water is very bad for rockets), the whole program was so expensive that the US would've been better off launching people in throwaway return capsules on regular rockets.
Meanwhile, SpaceX is actually landing the rocket in upright position. No salt water dip. The whole rocket is so cheap and procedure is so normalized that by this point, most people have lost count as to how many flights a given F9 first stage already had. I think they've already flown at least one booster 6 times. This is how true reusability looks like - saving money, increasing cadence, and well on its way towards the ultimate goal: being able to land a rocket, refuel it, and launch it again, all within couple hours at most.
Cost is not the entire point of reusability, especially the first to substantially pull it off (Space Shuttle). Demonstrating and developing the technology is part of it too. Starship for example will use ceramic tiles, not identical with, but still proved out by Space Shuttle, which used them first.
You are also comparing amortized program cost of space shuttle and not final marginal cost (around $450million per launch at 7 astronaut capacity and higher payload capacity).
You should define "better" carefully. Even today, there is no Tesla vehicle that comes close to, e.g., a Toyota Camry/Prius on the cost per mile front once you account for depreciation and maintenance.
This is a fair point. If your definition of "better" is raw kilometers per unit cost for a four-wheeled vehicle which can seat four adults, then a string of 5-year-old Hyundais is probably nigh unbeatable.
Just curious, do you have numbers to support this?
If you purchased a model 3 with both state and federal rebates a year or two ago, in a number of states the short range RWD model was the sticker price of a nice civic. And Biden has frequently floated massive tax breaks for EV purchases to come….
The maintenance is extremely infrequent and cost of travel per mile is cheap for electric, like an order of magnitude cheaper than a typical consumer car, not sure about a Prius.
Depreciation is definitely in teslas favor- the cars hold their value incredibly well compared to most every other vehicle…
Not at all. The engineering at Tesla makes a civic / Prius look like a child’s toy.. I brought up the tax rebates because ‘cost of ownership’ was the metric discussed, and taxes are certainly involved with that for any EV since the gov incentivized ownership.
The max rebate was ~7k if you lived in California and were on the first wave of federal credits I think? And the difference between a model 3 and a civic / Prius is way more than 7k, although that is subjective. Cost of ownership is objective.
> If you purchased a model 3 with both state and federal rebates a year or two ago, in a number of states the short range RWD model was the sticker price of a nice civic. And Biden has frequently floated massive tax breaks for EV purchases to come….
I am referring to today. There are no federal tax incentives right now for Tesla.
> The maintenance is extremely infrequent and cost of travel per mile is cheap for electric, like an order of magnitude cheaper than a typical consumer car, not sure about a Prius.
Maintenance is infrequent for a reliable gas vehicle as well. Things like new tires, AC repairs are common for both. As for fueling costs, the difference in essentially any state between a hybrid vehicle (Camry hybrid) and an electric one (Tesla model 3) doesn't exceed 5 cents per mile - I used WA as an extreme point with respect to the gas/electricity differential for this calculation. Thus over 60000 miles the fueling cost is only $3000 in favor of the electric vehicle. In most states it will be significantly lower. This number will also reduce if one uses the supercharger network frequently.
> Depreciation is definitely in teslas favor- the cars hold their value incredibly well compared to most every other vehicle…
As for rebates: my point was there was a time and likely will be another where the sticker price drops significantly.
As for maintenance: after having owned and worked on multiple ICE cars and now a model 3, the maintenance is night and day.. way less frequent with a model 3, and way fewer consumable parts.
As for fuel cost: I didn’t realize you were pitching a hybrid Camry, my discussion was comparing to pure ICE vehicles, haven’t looked at hybrid costs. I spend about 1/3rd in fuel costs and drive often so it added up very quickly.
As for depreciation: that appears to be a generic calculator, and you entered something above $40k for a model 3 which is just under $40k rn without rebates, which obviously exist and shouldn’t be ignored. Look around online, it is widely known that certain vehicles hold their value over time better than others, typically Jeep Wranglers, some trucks, popular mod platforms, all teslas that don’t have a salvage title. This is speaking from experience shopping for the aforementioned vehicles and being a car guy. Generic depreciation calculators are useful for tax purposes, not projecting consumer resale value.
Anyways, this doesn’t even take into effect that the m3 is awesome compared to a Prius / Camry. there’s a middle ground between our opinions, but the model 3 is more affordable than people think.
as long as we ignore the CO2 dumped by Camry/Prius and its cohorts across the industry causing existential crisis hey they will beat others on cost/mile.
If you really want to go down this route and account for this externality, you should calculate the cost of carbon capture. Costs of carbon capture are around $100 per metric tonne. The above link suggests a differential of around 6-10 tonnes of C02 in favor of the Tesla over a hybrid. This amount to an extra $1000 in favor of the Tesla. Once again, this doesn't change my point about cost per mile at all.
Note that it's not a 35% improvement/decrease, it's a 65% decrease, or put another way, 1/3 the emissions. It's not an order of magnitude, but a factor of 3 ain't bad, and CO2 from battery pack production will get better as the energy sources used get cleaner. Also, it looks like they're assuming a car lifetime of 250k km, which I think is pretty conservative for these. They also assumed a linear decrease in CO2 in power generation, which they say is a conservative assumption, and I agree. A number of their other assumptions lean on the conservative side, I assume for being more defensible, so I'd be somewhat surprised if the real difference isn't a good bit larger.
This is because his initial promises are so completely unbelievable that even getting in the same ballpark is an amazing accomplishment.
Barring a couple of obvious outliers (looking at you, FSD) he's typically within an order of magnitude of his completely insane predictions. Line that performance up against anyone else and the difference is stark.
SpaceX landing rockets? It’s really cool, but no one reasonable said you cannot land rockets. People questioned if it’s worth it. And this question still remains - they massively overestimated size of the market (they were planning to have launches weekly or more often). Instead they have rare commercial launches and they use it for internal project, that has also lots of questions about profitability. But it successfully kicks can down the road.
Electric car wasn’t questioned if it’s possible (expect for some freaks). And first mass market EV wasn’t even from them. Leaf (with its many flaws) until not long ago was best selling EV combined.
It was questioned if you can make in a way that profit, range and scale can meet. And Tesla still struggles at all of them.
Boring tunnels? Look at the tunnel in Las Vegas and tell me with a straight face that this is a future of transportation.
> It’s really cool, but no one reasonable said you cannot land rockets. People questioned if it’s worth it.
Not true.
> And this question still remains - they massively overestimated size of the market (they were planning to have launches weekly or more often).
No it doesn't. Even launching less often it would have been worth it.
And of course they did it the first time only a few years ago, the impact of dropping prices in launch are only really now starting to impact the industry.
They are launching every 1-2 weeks. If SpaceX didn't do Starlink there would be 4-5 other companies wanting create such constellations. Many other large constellations are in planning.
> But it successfully kicks can down the road.
It made something possible that wasn't possible before and that was the whole point.
> Boring tunnels? Look at the tunnel in Las Vegas and tell me with a straight face that this is a future of transportation.
Its amazing how people look at the first prototype of something and make judgment. The first roadster was a not really a great car. The Falcon 1 wasn't really that great a rocket.
If you said about the Falcon 1 'this is the future of rocketry'? No, Starship is where the whole development has lead to.
Boring company public infrastructure company that is 5 years old and born out of a basically a hobby project. And they already done quite a bit in that time and are winning competitive bids for other projects. Most companies that want to build transportation infrastructure spend decades in project planning.
Based on first principle you try to figure out the right solution. Then start building prototype and product and improve them significantly with each generation. What matters is speed of innovation and having the right conceptual idea.
No-one said it was physically impossible. Nobody thought it was a valid business plan, though. And these days I don't know of any credible concerns about SpaceX's profitability even if Starlink doesn't pan out.
> Electric car wasn’t questioned if it’s possible
No-one questioned if it was possible to make an EV of some description. What was questioned was whether it was practical to make an EV more desirable than an ICE. Tesla wouldn't be struggling with scaling issues if they weren't wildly successful. All of a sudden EVs winning drag races is handwaved as "but of course they won, they're EVs" where 2-3 years ago it would have been inconceivable.
> Boring tunnels?
TBH I'd forgotten about the whole tunneling thing. When I said 'insane predictions' I was talking about the impossible predictions re. FSD.
Who do you want to compare with? I don't know that many famous people that make completely unbelievable predictions that don't pan out, do you have any examples?
How about his promise to solve the Flint water crisis for any home above FDA levels? Promise to manufacture ventilators? Promise to return to the Thailand cave and demonstrate his submarine will work? Solar roof tiles delivered by slowly growing them to near the size of traditional panels, and not in anyway cheaper than a normal roof. Promise to build a rollercoaster with a loop made with cars on rails and frozen yogurt stands if employees don't unionize? Vegas Loop delivery vs what was sold initially? Promise to deliver proof of his claims against Unsworth?
