True. Watching him shoot rockets into space from my backyard 3-4x a month and seeing a half dozen Teslas on the road every time I drive a few miles isn’t very substantive at all.
What about FSD? Boring Company? Robo Taxies? Solar? Cybertruck? Neurolink? Mars colonies? Elon has had some amazing successes, that's just a fact, but judging what he will accomplish based on what he says is almost always a losing bet.
Boring Company is right up with Tesla and SpaceX on the success trajectory by lots of measures. This is a company that just started from nothing a few years ago, and it’s already building a massive transit project, and is in final bidding in several other major projects.
They’re already building their own tunnel boring equipment.
The company raised $675 million at a $5.65 billion valuation, putting it ahead of several S&P 500 stocks in market cap, closest to Alaska Airlines.
To say this is unusual is an understatement.
At this point in SpaceX history, the company had yet to launch Falcon 1.
I think a whole lot of people are going to be mightily shocked at how successful this company will turn out. In ten years, when it’s clear how successful it is, everyone will pretend the idea was stunningly obvious and was only successful through public financing, or something like that.
Boring Company is all hype, it's current trajectory is failure.
> it’s already building a massive transit project
It's only massive in terms of wasted taxpayer funds. The Vegas tunnel is a boondogle, and per Elon's signature style, completely unlike anything that he promised, their next tunnel will be the same.
> In ten years, when it’s clear how successful it is, everyone will pretend the idea was stunningly obvious and was only successful through public financing, or something like that.
I won't. If boring company has built any noteworthy tunnels within the next ten years, feel free to come back and have yourself a dropbox moment with my comment.
> It's only massive in terms of wasted taxpayer funds
I'm confused, because you called-out the Vegas tunnel, but are you claiming a 30-mile, 55-station tunnel is not a massive project? Or are you referring to the already-built 1.7 mile LVCC Loop?
Beyond that, there are no taxpayer dollars used in the project. It's entirely privately financed. In fact, the system pays a concession fee to Las Vegas.
> If boring company has built any noteworthy tunnels within the next ten years
Well, TBC is already constructing the 55-station Las Vegas Loop as we speak. It's scheduled to open in 2 years, at least partially by Super Bowl LVIII in Vegas in February 2024. The entire system will not be done, but enough of it will be to be noteworthy.
> feel free to come back and have yourself a dropbox moment with my comment.
I will try to remember to do that! Don't worry, you won't be the only one who got this wrong.
I would love to agree but it's simply not correct. They are buying existing tunneling machines and there is nothing yet to suggest a step change.
The radical proposals in terms of stripping out safety equipment for operational tunnels may prod some development, but ultimately any gains here are not going to be captive and will just result in revised client expectations (outside Boring funding & delivering projects worth $10bn+ individually themselves, with no public involvement).
> They are buying existing tunneling machines and there is nothing yet to suggest a step change.
That is incorrect. That is how they started, but they are now using Prufrock 2, which is both designed and built by The Boring Company, though I agree there has yet to be much of a step change in technology. Prufrock 2 is not the fastest tunnel boring machine in the world, and its porpoising feature has had some setbacks, needing to be dug out.
But all of this kind of misses the point. It ultimately doesn't matter if the tunnel boring machine is extraordinarily better. The Boring Company is applying the exact same philosophies that has made Tesla and SpaceX successful: extreme vertical integration and rapid iteration.
What matters is that TBC controls the boring machine. They control the design, they control the manufacturing process, and they have a willingness to experiment and iterate. The company is 5 years old and is now on its fourth tunnel boring machine.
And given the design of TBC transportation systems, there's no reason you can't have a dozen tunnel boring machines running simultaneously.
There was nothing remarkable about Falcon 9 when it launched. It was old tech, with a few good ideas, and one killer feature: extraordinary cost savings.
What about Sun King? Dig It? Don't Bother Me? Boys? Flying? (all terrible Beatles songs)
When you have successes like Tesla and SpaceX and PayPal it doesn't really matter how many failures you have. This isn't like being an airline pilot where you're judged by your worst outing.
Do I believe him when he says "Teslas will be full self driving in six months" like he has for the last 10 years? No. He's definitely a PT Barnumesque figure.
Do I believe that Tesla will get to full self driving eventually? Yes.
You want to make the accusation that the business failures of someone who has had legitimate successes on the scale of Elon Musk are con jobs then the burden of proof is on you. And I don't see an proof. Not from you, and not from anyone else who says it.
Hyperloop is very much a con job. "Full Self Driving is just a year away" is very much a con job. The cybertruck is a con job. The Tesla Semi is a con job. The tesla robot is a con job.
> but judging what he will accomplish based on what he says is almost always a losing bet.
He is literally the richest man in the world. Do you think he isn’t a successful gambler because of a few $1 bets that haven’t paid off (yet on many) vs the several $1000 bets that have?
The rocket landing stuff largely borrow from DC-X and the spinoff work at NASA (+Lars Blackmore), all originally Strategic Defense Initiative development.
He used all that money from Mike as collateral for loans to Tesla
Rome wasn't built in a day and were all standing on the shoulders of giants. However you need trailblazers to cut through and push the threshold. Elon is a hacker and disruptor and entrenched interests would like to just keep things they way they were, thereby pumping money into PR firms to talk down disruption and innovation. You're either a paid talk downer or a victim of that.
This is exactly what I mean. Musk had very little to do with actually designing rockets. Much like Thomas Edison his main skill is getting credited for the work of other people.
I keep seeing people say that Musk had little to do with SpaceX's technical side, and I wonder where this meme (in the original Dawkins sense of the word) is coming from.
If you watch the EverydayAstronaut interviews with Musk it shows that he has a deep understanding of the engineering tradeoffs and design reasons for many components of the rocket, and in fact is being quite careful with what he can share due to not wanting to leak company secrets. In fact, some of the questions that were asked in the earlier interview were re-referenced in a later interview as having been considered and leading to design changes.
I think Musk is a smart engineering type who sees finance, PR, politics etc as just another engineering problem, with all the pros and cons that creates. He's had a ton of success in hard-tech fields just by not being an idiotic pointy-haired-boss in a world where finance and political people are repeatedly being put in charge of projects and companies whose tech they don't understand. This doesn't mean he is likeable, or someone you'd want to have a beer with, or moral, or anything else. But it does mean he is capable of managing a tech company better than most, if we use the success of the company as our capable-of-managing-a-company metric.
I'm happy to see information to the contrary, but so far this is the closest I've seen to actual human/work style interactions with him. What would you suggest as alternative data sources which could be used to build a more accurate opinion?
No, his main skill is believing that big things are possible, and then being willing to commit resources and to be patient to let those possibilities come to reality when many others are will not.
Well I have seen the world, and I am not biased or frankly even a Musk fan, despite finding myself defending him as of late here on HN. I don’t own a Tesla (find them ugly vehicles), don’t use or care about Twitter, but I’ll admit that I think the SpaceX stuff is pretty exciting mainly because I can see it.
I said this on another thread but I will say it here too. Musk’s genius and value is not his engineering skill but his willingness to think about big possibilities and then be fearless and patient enough to make what many others think are risky (and stupid) bets on those possibilities.
We need folks like that. They move the needle far more than the random HN engineers who feel that the Musks and Edison’s of the world aren’t relevant because they “didn’t design or engineer” the technologies they made viable to the masses.
Musk and Edison’s roles—were not as the engineers of technology, but as the facilitators of the engineers.
You're not familiar with Henry Ford and his reputation? People whose personality solely consists of embarrassingly irrational hatred of Musk are as cringeworthy as those who worship him.
Hate is a very strong feeling. The threshold for hating a co-human should be quite high. Most people "hating" Musk have not met him and have not been assaulted, wronged or harmed by him, and he has only had minor impact on their lives (depending on how much credit you give him personally for products such as Tesla)
I find it difficult to understand the level of aggressiveness he awakes in some people. Are they actually feeling hate or just camouflaging some other feelings? Envy? Injustice? Are they hating him on the behalf of others?
It really is. There are thousands of more hateable public figures who have done far less good and far more bad who get only a tiny fraction of the hate I see on hackernews and reddit. Heck, pick a billionaire that's not Bill Gates...
Musk has an actual hatedom of people who try and downplay every good thing he's done and every good trait he has while spreading bad rumours about him, both well founded (impulsive, stubborn, optimistic to delusional levels and not good with peoples feelings) and not (Musk knows nothing about rockets, paypal money came entirely from superrich daddy's slave labour emerald mines and no one wanted the mini submarine).
