The best counter argument to that is that he did manage to predict/make into reality electric vehicles (when going into that industry was crazy) and reusable rockets. If someone makes a thousand moonshot attempts but still succeeds with two that's impressive.
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?
Gigapress has almost nothing to do with Tesla. It is just the name given by Tesla to a process they purchase from a third party vendor(Idra Group). Tesla was the first to use this product for large scale automotive production though.
You say that like they bought something off the shelf which just worked the first time they used it. They did not - it was a collaboration and Tesla spent a lot of money and time to get it to work.
I'm not gonna link the articles, but there are photos of the mountains of defective parts and plenty of people complaining about how terrible the first cars produced that way were. Tesla persevered and now other car manufacturers are trying to duplicate their results.
> Nearly all of his profit was government subsidies designed to push EV adoption
The government subsidies were available to his competitors at the time. Its not like that gave him a competitive advantage. Everyone else was on the same playing field.
That's very silly. Weed doesn't turn people into habitual liars. Secondly, he was abusing drugs before that interview. Thirdly, he was telling absurd lies before that interview too. The hand wringing about him smoking a blunt is absurd, he doesn't have "reefer madness".
It's not the weed that fried his brain, it's the ketamine. That moment where he smoked up on camera seems to coincide pretty well with him losing his mind, though.
People get ketamine treatments for depression all the time. It's not drugs, he's just a nasty person who's been good at manipulating people in the past. People have just finally caught on to the con, at least in part because he's terminally online.
Before he smoked that reefer, his space company was catching the largest booster ever made with metal chopsticks, all paid for by global satellite internet revenue.
His electric crossover/SUV was the best selling car in America.
Now that he’s gotten distracted by politics I dislike, he’s not doing any of that. Definitely no longer the world’s greatest builder.
> all paid for by global satellite internet revenue.
Huh? You think starlink is funding space-x? If they lost all government and private launch business tomorrow and had to rely on Stalink revenues to stay in business they wouldn’t last through next month.
> His electric crossover/SUV was the best selling car in America.
It was, and then he fried his brain and decided to support fascists across the globe and can’t understand why people no longer want to support him or his businesses.
He apparently watched handmaid’s tale and thought “man those Gilead guys are really onto something”.
I dont think Starlink can actually make money without government subsidies and a whole lot of inactive users. It simply cannot scale, the width spot beams are limited by physics - they cannot get small enough to get the density needed.
I think that's the point? I'd always assumed Starlink was a way to fill in coverage gaps in low-density areas where cable would cost more than it was worth, not cities?
In the last year alone, around 2/3 of space X's revenue was directly tied to starlink launches.
> If they lost all government and private launch business tomorrow and had to rely on Stalink revenues to stay in business they wouldn’t last through next month.
> the truth is that he's accomplished some crazy things.
I would argue: yes, to the extent that a leader gets to be described as having "accomplished" the work of the team.
It's not nothing, to be a visionary and charismatic leader!
But at the same time… when the reality distortion field seems to be in the process of transforming into a cult of personality, I think it's fair to ask if he'll ever again do something like a new SpaceX or a new Tesla, either as a maker or an investor.
I'm not sure when the cut-off between the two states, RDF and cult, would be. Not unreasonable to say it was when he libelled the cave diver, but there are other times it could've been.
> 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.
Something is missing here. Once you get two moonshots done, you have free pass to claim anything any number of times with zero results? I cannot agree.
That’s underselling the Leaf quite a lot. The original 2011 model had 107 HP and 207 ft-lb of torque (later bumped to 147 and 236, respectively), which puts it handily above several gas models of gas cars that don’t get labeled as golf carts. It was a perfectly fine car, it just had a poor battery.
> The issue is it had the range of a golf cart. So it basically ruled out 98% of the population that needs a car that can go on road trips.
You're trying to use weasel words to try to hide the fact that the Nissan Leaf, which was released in 2010 and elected world car of the year, was the world's most successful electric car and top-selling electric car until 2020.
That does not happen if 98% of anything doesn't like it.
Any claim involving "road trips" is a red herring because the Nissan Leaf was designed as a city car used in daily commutes, which means a daily driver for your 1h trips. This is by far the most popular use of a car in the world.
Why do you think it's design range was slightly over 300km? That roughly represents a ceiling of a round trip that takes 2 hours each direction.
For over a decade, the whole world has been buying Nissan Leafs more than any other electric car. How do you explain it?
> That does not happen if 98% of anything doesn't like it.
Actually it does. Electric car sales were so anemic during that time claiming the title made it trivial to be supported by 2% of the population.
> Any claim involving "road trips" is a red herring because the Nissan Leaf was designed as a city car used in daily commutes, which means a daily driver for your 1h trips. This is by far the most popular use of a car in the world.
No it’s not. “Range anxiety” was a constant refrain for anything mentioning electric cars during the first 20 years of the century.
A “city car” isn’t a concept in the US. Only when you get into upper middle class where people can afford multiple cars per household is when you could sacrifice one car like this.
I dunno, as someone who was raised in a pretty rural area and has since lived in both cities and suburbs, I think the need for long distance driving is dramatically overstated.
From my rural hometown, the drive to varying degrees of civilization (just big enough to have a small shopping center up to the state capital) is about 25 and 75 miles, respectively. Cities sized in between are around 40-50mi out. The drive to the nearest tiny town for groceries and such is about 2 miles.
I currently live in a suburb and everything one might need, including an international airport, is within a 30mi radius, with the majority of that being within a 5mi radius.
With that in mind and remembering that the bulk of the population lives in cities or their surrounding metro areas, "city cars" are viable for more people than they aren't. Sometimes they'd be better suited as secondary vehicles dedicated to errands, which at first glance might seem more expensive, but the dramatically better fuel economy of e.g. a tiny hybrid or even plain gas car quickly adds up, and in states with cheap electricity combined with scheduled charging at off-peak times, the scales are tilted even further if you have a plug-in hybrid or full EV. The up-front cost is higher, but you quickly make that back from not having to haul the big gas hungry SUV or truck around all over the place.
More than half of US households have multiple cars. The market that can handle a limited-range car is enormous; most of those households and many single car households too. And the existence of range anxiety doesn't change that.
> Actually it does. Electric car sales were so anemic during that time claiming the title made it trivial to be supported by 2% of the population.
What are you talking about? The Nissan Leaf was the world's best-selling electric car until 2020, outselling all Tesla's until Tesla Model 3 surpassed it. Are you trying to claim with a straight face that electric cars weren't being used en masse until 2020?
> No it’s not. “Range anxiety” was a constant refrain for anything mentioning electric cars during the first 20 years of the century.
I don't think you are being serious. "Rage anxiety" was literally GM propaganda to throw FUD at electric cars.
As a second car in a two-car family, we love our Leaf. It’s obviously unusable for road trips, but in a country with more registered cars than drivers, there are plenty of multi-car households where one could be a Leaf-class (cheap but still reliable) electric.
Sure, but the original Tesla car received exactly 0 Musk input. That was pretty much a done design when he bought the company. And ofc he ousted the original designers and tried to erase them from history. And the model 3 is pretty much building upon that.
AC propulsion was founded in 1992 and began developing an AC electric powertrain then, using lead acid batteries. By 2003 they had three prototypes built, and in 2003 they converted to lithium ion. At this point they were encouraged to commercialize.
Tesla was founded in 2003, and licensed the power train developed above. Musk bought into the company in 2004. Tesla teamed up with Lotus in 2004. The first Tesla Roadster prototype was shown in 2006 and delivery of production cars began in 2008. By 2009 they had made 500 of them.
I don't like the man very much either, but exaggerating the state of Tesla before Musk was involved is silly. Before the Model S, Tesla was very small and it wouldn't have surprised anybody if it dried up and blew away in the wind.
Yes, early Tesla cabins just oozed luxury, for twice or more what the Leaf cost. :eyeroll: Regardless, Nissan put out production EVs before Tesla did, accouterments aside.
So Elon invented selling a slightly more expensive EV in a state with generous government support for this?
A business plan that the real Tesla founders actually came up with because they'd seen Silicon Valley homes with Porsches and Prius parked next to each other and thought they could combine those two things?
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.
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.
Whether or not they're credible to you, they're still the #2 ranked general medicine journal in the world, second only to the NEJM.
> USAID isn’t an aid organization, it’s a front for CIA efforts internationally
This is a conspiracy theory that can be trivially refuted by simply following the money. You can do this because their budget is public, unlike the budget of the CIA. The stuff you're citing from a half century ago isn't relevant to the work they've been doing when Musk said "Time for it to die."
What USAID actually was was a vital tool of US soft power and influence globally, and if you believe that it's important to wipe out the last remaining vestiges of the United States' perception as 'the good guys' then by all means it was very important to stop their work immediately.
> Whether or not they're credible to you, they're still the #2 ranked general medicine journal in the world, second only to the NEJM.
Their ranking is based on how often papers are referenced in total, not the validity of any one paper. As I said, they been criticized for serious lapses in publishing fraudulent papers.
> The stuff you're citing from a half century ago isn't relevant to the work they've been doing when Musk said "Time for it to die."
I'm sorry what? It's the same organization? The fact that USAID was funding paramilitary organizations during war tells you USAID has nothing to do with aid.
> USAID actually was was a vital tool of US soft power and influence globally....if you believe that it's important to wipe out the last remaining vestiges of the United States' perception as 'the good guys' then by all means it was very important to stop their work immediately.
So you're saying unless the US can project soft power and influence (which is ALWAYS to the US' benefit, it absolutely is not altruistic) it won't be viewed as the "good guys"?
Let’s not pretend that Trump knew or cared what USAID was. Musk was extremely hands-on with the dismantling of that agency specifically.
I didn’t share my thoughts, I shared a Lancet article calculating the death toll. I leave the math, the comparisons, and the moral judgments as an exercise for the reader.
I don't speak for mullingitover, but… "other" reasons? Surely all the stuff he's done are the reasons?
And Musk seems to have tarred himself:
Tesla sales are down a lot even in places where the market is growing, in part because it was lefty liberals who were the original primary market for EVs.
Musk's support for Trump (who openly hates eco-friendly anything and appears to be tanking the US economy with inflation and tariffs and the only growth sector being AI DCs) also appears to be the reason the entire EV market in the US is going down.
He's also having spats with various national leaders. But… look, in UK, Keir Starmer has catastrophically poor opinion poll ratings, Musk's managing to bob around the same level, slightly worse, in part due to tweeting things seen as calling for a civil war in the UK.
Similar in Germany. Where the Gigafactory is… ah, still a building site, not having needed to expand to the full potential of the water licence it had. (A factoid I only know about due to comparisons with the combined AI data centre use across the state of Arizona).
Reusable rockets are a rehash of old tech that was considered - at the time - not economically feasible; Given how subject to interpretation spacex commercial numbers are, there is nothing indicating a clear cost or efficiency advantage compared with traditional launch systems so far. What we clearly know is that using software development methodologies to building critical hardware is as a bad idea as it sounds.
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.
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.
Yeah, Falcon rockets are a regular workhorse kinda rockets. Nothing special about them. NASA could have made their own but someone decided it needs to be outsourced.
I mean they did a fine job there, but nothing to write home about IMHO.
And on the topic of reusability I can't really find much info besides that it is just partially reusable. Not sure what the point of it actually is. I guess what matters is the launch price?
The question I still have it, wasn't SpaceX supposed to get USA back on the moon? And I heard they got billions in subsidies but have nothing to show for it.
> The question I still have it, wasn't SpaceX supposed to get USA back on the moon? And I heard they got billions in subsidies but have nothing to show for it.
AFAICT, SpaceX are not the bottleneck holding this back. Or at least, not the only one.
And they do have something to show for it, just not a complete final version. Starship is not yet fully reusable, and I will not make any bet on if they even can make it so as this is not my domain, but if you skip the re-use it is already capable of yeeting up a massive payload to LEO, enough to do a lunar mission.
It’s a commercial launch company. Of course the price matters and it being so much cheaper than the trash from ULA, Russia, etc is why there has been an explosion in new space endeavors (see the bandwagon launches).
> Nothing special about them. NASA could have made their own but someone decided it needs to be outsourced.
“Anyone could have done it bro,” is such an ignorant response. Nobody did it and there was the entire launch industry to collect if they did.
Even if NASA could have, they were derelict of duty in enabling space utilization because they never did it.
> And I heard they got billions in subsidies but have nothing to show for it.
Should probably check stuff before you repeat it. SpaceX has not received billions in subsidies for going to the moon. It did win a contract to do it, which as the name implies has required deliverables.
Its a private startup. It may operate on a loss, leveraged by private equity and government contracts.
Everything else you mention becomes irrelevant. Until we know the costs and operational margins, there is no certainty if they are delivering what they promised.
Spacex is a private company; this means "we" know nothing about actual costs. Fundraising documents dont show this either, as they are a washed-down version for, well, fundraising purposes. As an investor, it is common practice to sign an NDA just to get access to actual somewhat relevant numbers, so any actual relevant info isnt public.
Also it seems you conflate "making money" with being profitable - its not the same thing. A private company can easily "massage" the PNL sheet to present itself as at a break-even point, and some back-of-the-napkin calculation seems to point to it. Granted, I may be wrong, but the fact is we don't know for sure.
You also seem to not be aware that there are multiple internet satellite providers with south pole coverage, as well as other regions in the globe.
> Spacex is a private company; this means "we" know nothing about actual costs. Fundraising documents dont show this either, as they are a washed-down version for, well, fundraising purposes. As an investor, it is common practice to sign an NDA just to get access to actual somewhat relevant numbers, so any actual relevant info isnt public.
None of this is correct. You don’t get fidelity as an investor repeatedly publishing fraudulent documents.
Also, it’s not like spacex can hide costs. There is no other supply of money to cover operations.
> You also seem to not be aware that there are multiple internet satellite providers with south pole coverage, as well as other regions in the globe.
They are a joke. Completely different leagues of access. Coverage of the South Pole (not McMurdo) got effective continuous bandwidth around the throughput of dialup and periodic passes from a polar sat to upload scientific data.
GEO is absolutely terrible in terms of latency and cost. Starlink is currently the only good option for the entire ocean and any remote place on earth not reachable by fiber infra.
The only up and coming potential competitor is Amazon’s Kuiper/Leo. China is also experimenting here but it’s not clear that will be available to the world.
Claiming there are alternatives to Starlink is extremely ignorant. It only takes a brief glimpse of what it’s doing to both maritime and aviation to understand that it’s unique.
> None of this is correct. You don’t get fidelity as an investor repeatedly publishing fraudulent documents.
Did I say they were fraudulent? I'm merely stating that tag price means nothing, as they probably are "selling" it at a loss (btw the initial projected falcon price was 10 mil per launch, and the current tag price is ~60 mil, with no strong stats nor costs on reusability). The only way to know for sure is to have access to privileged info behind an NDA. Do you even know what you're talking about? Have you ever reviewed this kind of documents?
> They are a joke. Completely different leagues of access. Coverage of the South Pole (not McMurdo) got effective continuous bandwidth around the throughput of dialup and periodic passes from a polar sat to upload scientific data.
South pole coverage is relevant for like, 3 people. None of the data collected from/to there requires urgency; there is zero scientific advantage other than quality-of-life. Consider this, we receive scientific data from mars.
> GEO is absolutely terrible in terms of latency and cost. Starlink is currently the only good option for the entire ocean and any remote place on earth not reachable by fiber infra.
Remote places tend to have no coverage, because they have no subscribers. Not sure what you think a profitable business is, but you come off as really asinine. There is nothing inherently unique to starlink - except the fact that they're polluting LEO with their garbage. If its sustainable or not, time will tell.
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.
