Lots of famous scams became insanely huge before collapsing under their facade. Enron, Theranos, etc.
You rarely see any evidence that Elon does anything but pay (...sometimes...), threaten and scare people into delivering on his demands
Everything is about first principles. You know, the most basic simple starting blocks. They teach it to high school kids. People act like that's magic....
Enron developed quite a few actual energy projects in the real world. They were as much of a legit company as a car manufacturer, but the scam part of Enron eventually got so big that it blew everything up.
Many big scams involve substantial "real" components, and sometimes the scammers have a balancing-act where too much success in either portion can threaten the other.
See also: Lying for Money: How Legendary Frauds Reveal the Workings of the World by Dan Davies.
I mean… sure… it was also propagating a massive, institutional scale accounting fraud that brought down a “Big Five” accounting firm. Comparing these two companies to Tesla is insincere.
FSD is really the only product sold by Tesla that’s been a true let down for years vs the marketing hype, but they have not given up on it, and are now delivering on the hype. The rest of their main line products are industry leading.
I'm not sure I'd limit it to FSD. The CyberTruck has several very glaring flaws that would not have happened had someone at Tesla talked Elon into accepting just a bit of conventional wisdom from the automotive industry. Things like "provide a protective layer of paint over the sheetmetal of the vehicle's body to prevent rust."
The new Tesla Roadster and Semis for commercial customers are either way off their timetable or facing further production problems.
Fit and finish on some models remains subpar.
I don't think it's enough to sink the company in the near-term, particularly in the US, but it's proof that charisma and vision doesn't solve issues with industrial capacity.
Disagree on that. Subpar quality, delays, rejecting conventional wisdom are not scams or fraud, though it is risky. He isn’t promising magic that doesn’t exist a la theranos, and he has even personally stated TSLA is overvalued (vs Enron…). except for FSD, which now exists with some imperfection.
I don’t own TSLA, I have owned a Y for 3 years and love it. I have a cybertruck on order knowing it may be my dumbest purchase of my life, but also maybe the best. I think Tesla is an amazing tech company that is needlessly brutal to its employees.
Theranos fell apart the second they signed a deal with Walgreens and it became obvious they were using machines made by other vendors to do blood tests, because their own thing didn't work.
Enron got away with as much as they did because of the far more generous accounting rules that were in play back then.
You rarely see any evidence that Elon does anything but pay (...sometimes...), threaten and scare people into delivering on his demands
Everything is about first principles. You know, the most basic simple starting blocks. They teach it to high school kids. People act like that's magic....