It means that when you defraud investors over outlandish claims, even if you believe you can do what you are claiming, then you have destroyed trust and made it harder for everyone else in the industry (who isn't making shit up) to get the funding to do the real work that creates real progress.
You seem to have skipped/ignored the whole paragraph where I give Elon lots of credit and then the part where I how people were treating Holmes before it was common knowledge that she was making shit up.
I don't believe she did that because she wanted to defraud investors, she just believed her own hype and was willing to lie more than most to maintain that hype... if you don't think that these exact conditions affect Elon, or the people that feed him information, then I think maybe you're suffering from some the negative effects of excessive fandom.
I just think it is disingenuous on your part to act like their output puts them in the same boat. You are lumping them together and I find that to be a completely inaccurate comparison. How you can compare someone who literally made nothing with someone who took his millions of dollars of worth and risked them on a space company and a car company ... it just blows my mind.
As far as self driving is concerned I do think that we might be suffering from early apply iphone prototype syndrome: at best we might be a couple of decades away from a solution to this problem. However, if you take the time to listen to some of the presentations given about how Tesla is actually trying to solve self driving, their approach sounds about as sound as I could expect to be.
Please note that defraud is something that applies to people who intentionally deceive. Of the two I would say that only Elizabeth falls in that boat: she went as far as to attempt to alter her voice intentionally among other things. When it comes to Elon, he is just too eager to see results happen. I have difficulty faulting him for that.
I lump them together in one dimension, the one where they can extract millions from investors based on hype.
Yes, Elon deserves the hype more because he has delivered in the past and he certainly has more skin in the game, but it doesn't mean he isn't still playing the "fake it till you make it" game to some extent, and because failures are more impactful than wins, I think it's a dangerous game to play with his reputation.
I want Elon to cut the hype BS because I think it will hurt him in the long run. It's all about trust for me, it's a resource that is being depleted at a rapid rate and it's extremely important to a functioning civilization.
You seem to have skipped/ignored the whole paragraph where I give Elon lots of credit and then the part where I how people were treating Holmes before it was common knowledge that she was making shit up.
I don't believe she did that because she wanted to defraud investors, she just believed her own hype and was willing to lie more than most to maintain that hype... if you don't think that these exact conditions affect Elon, or the people that feed him information, then I think maybe you're suffering from some the negative effects of excessive fandom.