The state department is proving themselves far more competent than the defense department. This just looks like further evidence to the poor leadership.
"Pete the Pathetic" looks to be using ham fisted measures to try and make companies compliant to his will.
Zero precision or intelligent application of force.
Conservatism has largely been unpopular outside of rural townships, and the nation continues to undergo a process of urbanization as young people continue to move to cities.
Normally, a healthy response to this would be to realign and target a more popular set of messaging and policy objectives. Instead the American Right has decided instead that this popularity (and the reflection in media) is a threat to its ability to continue serving a shrinking pool of wealthy benefactors.
It should come as no surprise that the moment they were handed the power, they began to push the boundaries of what is acceptable when it comes to censoring media they see as a threat.
Republicanism doesnt work for anyone but the wealthy, it will do everything in its power here.
Language changes over time, and I remember recent memes where a cute girl says something like "claiming you're moderate means you know conservatives don't get laid" (presumably because of abortion politics). It makes me wonder if the moderates actually became liberal or if they just don't want to use that word any more.
After all the polarism in "reality show politics", my diehard liberal friends seem less liberal to me, but they'll state which team they're on more fervently than ever.
> It should come as no surprise that the moment they were handed the power, they began to push the boundaries of what is acceptable when it comes to censoring media they see as a threat.
To be clear, they were “handed power” by decisively winning a national election, which sort of undercuts your opening statement about how unpopular they are.
Well the problem I see with this is that the population means very little in terms of national politics in comparison to most modern democratic nations.
So you can be California which in terms of population and GDP will surpass most of central America combined and it still just gets two representatives. Now I get that the idea here was to avoid a dictatorship of the majority that can just ignore smaller states, but the way it is now it is a dictatorship of the minority, even if you ignore all the blatant ways of voter disenfranchisement.
Sorry to all Republicans on here, but if your party needs to prevent people from voting to win, that also hurts you. Ideally you'd want a party to have to listen to their voters. Gerrymandering, predicting voter behavior and throwing out the ones who might not vote for you are all the shameful behavior of traitors to democracy.
This has to be stopped and punished on every political level, as long as you still have a say.
No. There is a long history of Republican voter disenfranchisement:
- In the 1980s The RNC created the Ballot Security Task Force [1], which was a scheme to strike people off the voter rolls by sending them a mailer if they didn't respond. This led to a consent decree requiring "preclearance" for any voter roll enforcement that lasted 25+ years [2];
- Republicans lead the charge in restricting access to mail-in voting because it's used more by Democratic Party voters [3] despite there being no evidence of fraud;
- In response to Arizona turning blue in 2020, Republicans went on a massive voter suppression spree [4], which disproportionately impacts Native Americans [5];
- Nationally, the push to have a street address unfairly impacts Native Americans who often don't have an official sstreet address if they live on a reservation. That's not an accident. It's the point;
- Even the push to force people to have birth certificates is aimed at Native Americans and poor people. There are quite literally millions of Americans who don't have them [6];
- Even if you have the necessary documentation to get an ID, you may have problems getting access. Again, this is by design. For example, Louisiana closed a bunch of DMV offices in minority areas such that the only DMV in certain black-majority areas was only open one day a month [7];
- The so-called SAVE Act recently passed by the house required your birth certificate to match your ID. Well, that's a problem for married women [8].
- States such as Florida have used private firms to strike people off the voter rolls if their name sounds like a convicted felon anywhere else in the country [9].
And why are we doing all this? There is zero evidence of voter fraud on a large scale [10]. And those convicted of voter fraud are most commonly Republican anyway [11].
But let's just say that we want an ID to vote. Why don't we fund the Federal government to issue it and make sure it is readily available and cheap or free? No, we can't have that because it's never been the point.
At some point you have to realize that they don't care about "integrity". Voter suppression is the point because it's the only way they can win elections.
Lastly, I feel compelled to remind people of Lee Atwater's famous 1981 remarks [12]. Republicans went from overt racism to being ever more abstract but the goals remained the same: to disproportionately impact black and brown people.
It's an assertion not backed by data. Non-citizens voting is infinitesimally small. Between that, Noem saying out loud "we want the right people to vote", and Trump calling for nationalized elections, it's clear what the real purpose is.
Early in-person voting and making election day a federal holiday are things everyone on all sides ought to be able to rally behind, together. Idk if any of that is in the SAVE Act though
As if that ever was a huge problem in the US. If you want people to vote and want to avoid disenfranchising US citizens there are ways to do that as demonstrated by the majority of countries on earth. When I vote for example in the EU (Austria), I proactively get a letter from the state (since I am in the voter register). With this letter and some ID card I can show up in the polling location on the weekend and vote after proofing I am the person on my ID card.
What if I am not home? I go to a website a month before the vote, they send me a letter and I vote whenever I like before my election.
Everybody has such an ID card since that card is what you would also show to proove your identity elsewhere. And since we have working social welfare every slice of the citizen population can also afford it.
If you want to solve that problem, it is possible. If you want to solve it, that is. Right wing parties will always use non-citizens as scapegoats that are at the same time draining the welfare state and stealing your jobs. Oh, and you votes. Believing them without citation is the problem here.
>you can be California which in terms of population and GDP will surpass most of central America combined and it still just gets two representatives
Doesn't California have 54 reps, out of 485? And 90 out of ~800 Article III judges (lifetime appointment). It also collects $858 billion a year in state and local taxes that it gets to do mostly what it wants with
Yes, but it only has two senators. The 39.5 million people in California have the same Senatorial representation as the less than 600 thousand people in Wyoming.
In what world is that fair or remotely democratic?
The people who wrote the constitution had plenty of experience with the First and Second Continental Congresses, and the Congress set up by the Articles of Confederation. And Parliament, and state legislatures. They both loved and feared democracy. Not everything in the constitution is meant to be democratic.
Senators were originally appointed by state governments to prevent the federal government from slowly weakening the states ( https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artI-S1-2-3/A... “To further allay Anti-Federalist concerns regarding concentrated federal power in Congress, the Federalists emphasized that bicameralism, which lodged legislative power directly in the state governments through equal representation in the Senate, would serve to restrain, separate, and check federal power”). That’s not really “democratic.”
In grade school, we focused on the fact that states with small populations weren’t enthusiastic about letting larger states set national policy. Sure, New York would have been happy to have more influence in both the House and the Senate than any other state, but Rhode Island, Delaware, and Connecticut weren’t going to sign under those terms. Horse trading to get them to join wasn’t “democratic” either, but they wouldn’t have joined any other way.
Don't think it was ever supposed to be. The Senate was set up by the founders to be picked by the State Legislatures anyway, not a direct vote. Did you read the Federalist Papers?
The idea was that the House of Reps exists to represent the people of the state, and the Senate exists to represent the state itself. The 17th Amendment did away with state legislatures choosing senators, so we have this wonky system left for no good reason.
And don't get me started on freezing the rep count to 435. I certainly don't feel represented by my congresscritter.
If California was apportioned the same as Wyoming, it would have 68 or 69 representatives (depending how you round). Not to play favorites: Texas would have 50 or 51 representatives.
Even if you just count the House of Representatives, smaller states have a per capita advantage.
Well, it's two days later now, and it turns out Colbert just lied. He didn't want to abide by the 95-year-old law about equal time, and didn't extend an offer to Jasmine Crockett.
Then he lied about it and the network corrected him.
But okay, yeah they pushed the boundaries and all that bullshit.
Conservatism is a set of political principles and values, which somebody like Trump overtly does not possess, and never did. The whole Republican party feels like a country wide gaslighting operation at this point. They claim to be conservative and Christian, but are clearly neither.
While I agree with much of what you say, there are a lot of urban, educated, socially left, economically right people (including myself) who complicate some of this analysis. Many economically right-wing people believe a free market is the most effective and helpful path to improve the standard of living for the working class and the poor. ("Progressive neoliberal social democracy", one might call it.)
The issues with Republicans right now go far, far, far beyond "they care more about the wealthy than the poor" (though that is definitely one of their core problems). They're basically destroying the rule of law, the country's internal and international reputation and credibility, all of our most important institutions, our ability to discern what is true, our sense of decency, our civil liberties, our basic respect of human rights... The class stuff is secondary or tertiary to the bigger issues, in my opinion.
Is it? Citizens in Wyoming, South Dakota, North Dakota have ~3x the voting power as citizens of California, seems pretty easy to win many of the things you mentioned on rural townships.
i believe you have that backwards, senate gets 2 representatives per state. house gets based on population (less gerrymandering!). but your point still stands
Palantir is a fantastically straightforward example of how a country experiencing an era of averice quickly degrades in the quality of its leadership.
Karp and Thiel are examples of certain types of personalities that make their way into positions of influence where they start to expel toxic cultural pollutants responsible for an empire's decline.
More people need to realize the parasitic relationship the wealthy in America currently occupy.
I'm wondering which of the PayPal mafia or other billionaires best represent Marcus Licinius Crassus taking food out of poor people's mouths and abolishing the republic for authoritarianism/oligarchy.
Seems to be an extension of something we are dealing with across multiple parts of many societies.
Monetary pursuit has become a guiding principle for alot of people, and its been revealed that such thinking is leading to major societal consequences.
The current Technocratic idealization of efficiency by those in powerful positions is missing the second order consequences of financializing everything, and it appears to me that we are sacrificing societal necessities like trustworthiness and collective responsbility in favor of more efficient markets.
If no corrective action is taken, we can expect increasing issues.
Michael Sandel's "What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets" covers it quite well.
Markets create unfairness by systematically disadvantaging the poor when money becomes necessary to obtain certain goods or quality of goods. Market values corrupt non-market spheres by changing the meaning and value of goods being exchanged (e.g., paying for grades undermines intrinsic desire to learn). Monetary incentives crowd out altruistic motivations and civic duty (e.g., fines becoming fees people willingly pay rather than norms to uphold). Commodification degrades human dignity (e.g., treating drug-addicted women as "baby-making machines" in sterilization-for-cash programs). Markets increase wealth inequality and create segregation in previously egalitarian spaces (e.g., luxury skyboxes in sports stadiums). Market exchanges under severe inequality or economic necessity become coercive, not truly voluntary. Purchased tokens of friendship and personal expressions (apologies, wedding toasts) lose their authenticity and dilute social bonds. Wealthy individuals and countries can pay their way out of moral obligations (e.g., carbon offsets instead of reducing emissions). Markets have infiltrated areas traditionally governed by ethical considerations - medicine, education, personal relationships - without public debate about whether this is desirable. The economic approach treats everything in an ethical vacuum, ignoring morality in favor of purely analyzing incentives.
Thank you, but again I'm just paraphrasing Sandel's work. He really puts into words that which I've personally felt without having the vernacular to put it into words myself (alongside one of his inspirations, Michael Young). I attended a couple of his lectures while he was in the UK, and he was fantastic.
I don't think it's even the money. It's the numbers and numerical "scoring".
You see all the same evil dishonest shit behavior in contexts where the $$ is negligible, fixed or not a KPI individuals are really scored on. Organized religion, academia, Internet comments, etc, etc.
One objection here: pay-for-sterilization doesn't match with the rest of these because this is treating it solely as a cost to the woman, rather than recognizing that there's a benefit in not bringing a child into a horrible life.
The objection is that offering cash exploits vulnerable women's desperation, treating their reproductive capacity as a commodity to be purchased. Even if the outcome might prevent more suffering, which is an individually subjective outcome, the means matters: it degrades the women involved by reducing a profound personal decision to a market transaction under conditions of coercion, where drug addiction makes the offer 'too good to resist.'
Monetary incentives are the foundations of Capitalism. There are only two ways that ethics might get in the way of their profits.
The first is government regulation. We saw lots of deregulation of oversight over the ten years before the 2008 financial crisis. None of the ethically compromised C-suite folks went to jail for their behavior because it was suddenly not a crime. Sometimes you have regulation, but you don't have enforcement of the regulations. This is what we get when the government is comprised of or controlled by capitalists. It's called fascism.
The second is public boycott or revolt. Could the new Target CEO be the result of the recent boycott? Same with Starbucks? Has anyone actually bought a Tesla in the past year? The big tech folks are bending over backwards to hide the fact that they have no real AI business model, making it a gigantic bubble that is about to burst. There is a national frenzy that no one is reporting on people ditching their subscriptions. We are going to see affordability get worse very quickly. It will be interesting to see what happens as more and more people start tightening their purse strings, whether by choice or necessity.
> Sometimes you have regulation, but you don't have enforcement of the regulations.
Indeed. Let us quote the Dune books (since they're trending, and for good reason!):
"Good government never depends upon laws, but upon the personal qualities of those who govern. The machinery of government is always subordinate to the will of those who administer that machinery. The most important element of government, therefore, is the method of choosing leaders.-Law and Governance (The Spacing Guild)"
And if you would let me indulge one more:
"Governments, if they endure, always tend increasingly toward aristocratic forms. No government in history has been known to evade this pattern. And as the aristocracy develops, government tends more and more to act exclusively in the interests of the ruling class: whether that class be hereditary royalty, oligarchs of financial empires, or entrenched bureaucracy.
-Politics as Repeat Phenomenon (Bene Gesserit Training Manual)"
There is a very, very clear and specific problem: "free" advertising supported sites incentivizes farming user engagement. Farming user engagement needs be sharply curtailed because it's proven to be broadly damaging to society and the direct way to do that is to reduce the incentive, advertising revenue. It's as straightforward as that.
Oddly enough, this comes from Google having a monopoly on web advertising. If you're an advertiser, let's say for the sake of argument you're a company with $80 billion in revenue, and you find your ads placed next to a ragebait post, you might complain to Google, and they will promptly send you a canned response and send your email to Gemini for use in training data. If human eyes ever chance to see your email, it's a good chance that people in that department aren't working hard enough and they should do a layoff.
> Monetary pursuit has become a guiding principle for alot of people
People need money to survive. The wealthy class have made it such that it's harder and harder to earn enough money the normal way. Often it doesn't even pay enough to survive. This is what creative people come up with in order to make a living. And it's obviously not in the wealthy class' interest to make any changes to that.
Doesn't make it excusable. I get it's hard to uphold principles when the stomach is empty. But it's clear the person in the piece wasn't thinking about much else, though he was also clearly not in the streets and starving.
Culture is a pendulum, but humans are consistently greedy.
"Journalistic integrity" was a marketing concept designed to sell newspapers at a time when there were hundreds and most were inaccurate. It was extremely profitable to have ethics. (A good reminder that noble minded Benjamin Franklin ran his own periodical that he regularly and intentionally slandered others in.)
Now we have an entrenched media (with their own ethics problems) and there is opportunity to start pumping out garbage again.
As Voltaire said, "History is only the pattern of silken slippers descending the stairs to the thunder of hobnailed boots climbing upward from below." In other words, progress has to be fought for from hard lessons, but once that progress is taken for granted, people let it slip not knowing the value of what they have.
Yes, humans can be greedy - but the question is whether we design our society to encourage and legitimize that greed in every sphere of life, or whether we maintain non-market norms that check it. The journalistic integrity example proves my/Sandel's point; when ethics became profitable, the market accidentally aligned with civic good. But the concern is precisely about areas where market logic systematically corrupts rather than improves outcomes - ie. where introducing money changes the nature of the good itself (like turning civic duty into a fee, or learning into a transaction). The pendulum swings, yes - which is exactly why we need ongoing public debate about where markets belong, rather than passively accepting their expansion into every domain and hoping the pendulum swings back on its own.
without human influence or directive, capital ceases to be become anything meaningful beyond [insert data type] at which point, it spreads like a cancer, ie: universal paperclips
Capitalism is revered due to how it has significantly impacted the living standards of populations that participate in it. But increasing the living standards of populations was never the purpose of capitalism, it was a simply a side-effect.
Capitalism started with the East India Company. That is the real Capitalist world choice. We treat our strongly regulated society as 'Capitalism' for some reason (while the Capitalists tell us we need to get rid of all the regulation that keeps them in check).
Capitalism left to it's own authority creates payment in company scrip and company towns. Capitalism WANTS labor trapped with company script/company towns. Just because society outlawed that doesn't mean Capitalism isn't working in other ways to recreate that. What Capitalism does not want is empowered labor or labor lifted out from dire situations. Society is what has done that, not Capitalism.
Without strict government oversight Capitalism is horrible and gives horrible results to society at large. It just has done an incredible job of painting modern society as Capitalism and claiming all benefits of things that aren't inherently from Capitalism but from Government oversite.
Sometimes, I wonder how people in the middle ages accepted the whole "Divine Right" of their ruling Kings, while simultaneously suffering under their rule.
> Larry Ellison, another hyper-informed genius business man
"King George, another royal blessed by the divine."
I don't know if you're aware of this, but American markets are hyper competitive. I'd be extremely wary of any instinct to discount the skill level of any top-20 self-made billionaire industrialist, really anywhere in the world, but in the US at least, that skillset is likely heavily skewed toward business excellence.
An off-the-cuff four word description on an Internet forum definitely exceeds the level of worship from a court jester in the 1400s that had to dress up in costume and dance at the command of a king, lest their head get cut off.
You're quite wrong about this. I know it's tempting to look at a damaged person and assume that they possess no actual extraordinary capabilities, but these people are very very smart. Surely they'd be top-tier HN. :)
(Defining "genius" is a whole nother thing, but using any common vernacular meaning, my statement will apply.)
Not all billionaires, of course. In context, we're talking about Ellison and Musk. There may be others implied. These people are in fact extremely intelligent. What's missing is not horsepower.
You're right - a healthy dose of luck, 'right place, right time', is also needed. Plus the arrogance to assume that they deserve everything they want.
> You're quite wrong about this. I know it's tempting to look at a damaged person and assume that they possess no actual extraordinary capabilities, but these people are very very smart. Surely they'd be top-tier HN. :)
Maybe you and I disagree on the definition of a genius; Ellison and Musk are of course smart, but there are very many smart people - that is also not sufficient, and 'genius' is not required. Elon Musk spends a lot of time arguing with random people on Twitter, and espouses some very dumb, and sometimes racist views. He's a good salesman (principally of himself), and possessed of huge self-confidence, but I don't see any evidence of genius. More like being born 3-0 up and convinced he'd scored a hat-trick, amplified by survivor bias; for every billionaire, there are thousands like them who just didn't get the right breaks.
Compare Elon and 'lawnmower' Larry to everyone's favourite genius, Einstein, and they're not even in the same league.
Why does he need a description? If Larry Ellison thinks something is true he can argue the case for it using the same universal logical principles which we all have access to.
Monopoly - so easy everyone can do it. We should give it a go! I would include managing your way into monopoly status and steering clear of being broken up as business skills; no?
The techbro cult is filled to bursting with greedy, narcissistic people who are wholly willing to ignore evil because they expect to be the next dispensers of said evil.
Doesn't the idea of Orbital Datacenters imply that the constraining resource right now is physical space, and not compute, electricity, etc?
Did we suddenly solve the electricity problem, or the compute problem?
As far as im aware there are still plenty of datacenters being planned and built right now.
But the "fraud" here is being done mostly to VC investors with deep pockets and lawyers, at least until he tries to take this entity public. And I can't imagine them just taking this lying down, but then again maybe they realize that offloading this steaming pile on public market investors is the best way out. But even then... SpaceX seemed like it was quite viable on its own, the investors there are the real losers here.
He also purchased Tesla once there was prototypes etc, not to say he didn't do anything good there or whatever (I have no idea what he really did) but yeah, people like to pretend he did all these things on his own or something.
I guess props to scamming Compaq into making a large investment that didn't pan out. He did personally make money so I guess win for him.
>In an effort to woo investors, Elon Musk built a large casing around a standard computer to give the impression that Zip2 was powered by a supercomputer.
>PayPal
Huh? He didn't found Paypal, his company was acquired by Paypal. You might as well give him credit for eBay while you're at it. Paypal released their first digital wallet in 1999. They acquired x.com (and Musk) in 2000. Paypal itself was then acquired by eBay in 2002.
>Tesla
Investor, not founder.
>SpaceX
Yup, props here.
>Grok/xAI
Hasn't made a penny, no signs it had any path to profitability, which is why it was shoved into Space-X to cover his personal losses.
Taking Tesla from where it was (an overpriced prototype) to what it is now did take some skill. He wasn't some passive investor who put money in and didn't do anything. The rest for sure he was gotten credit that isn't earned.
Does Leslie Groves deserve (some) credit for the Manhattan Project? Obviously there were people under him doing the actual day to day physics and chemistry work, but if a less effective person was in charge, the whole thing could have failed.
hey now. Lets not forget when Elon had Grok creating CSAM and sexually explicit material of nonconsenting women. Truely an... achievement? Surely it will propel humanity forward.
He can take out a full page Wall Street Journal ad tomorrow that says “I created hyperloop to kill CA HSR” and it will have no effect on the fact that CA HSR’s failure is 100% the fault of CA’s own dysfunction.
Yeah that’s where I’m confused about this “conspiracy theory” stuff. It’s common knowledge that Musk wanted hyperloop to undermine the high speed rail project and also it later failed. Aside from a single HN comment I have never seen anyone attribute him with that much influence on the thing, so it is bizarre to see someone talking like there’s some sort of common conspiracy theory that Elon Musk controls trains or whatever. As far as I know pretty much nobody believes that.
There is no conspiracy theory, that aside the link does not indicate that there is one? “Vaguely accurate” does not mean “untrue”, and Vance is clear that he is talking about his personal interpretation of what Elon Musk is documented to have said, which he does not refute.
I like the idea that “he didn’t say that” and “he did say that but a different guy feels like he probably meant something else” are so obviously equivalent that skepticism of that notion constitutes a ‘conspiracy theory’.
That aside I like that the guy whose opinion should be treated as indisputable fact said that he thinks that there hasn’t been any high speed rail built globally in the past decade, which is not even remotely true. Obviously if he meant to say in the US he would have said so, since his next sentence was praise of Musk’s world-wide achievements.
I suppose it’s possible that Vance either doesn’t know anything about high speed rail or was in such a rush to extoll the virtues of the CEO of Tesla that he just sort of blurted something out to make Musk look good?
The full quote is “vaguely accurate but a disingenuous take”. And “Disingenuous” means “misleading/dishonest/untruthful/insincere/unfair”.
> Obviously if he meant to say in the US he would have said so
Come on, from the context it is clear that Vance means the US and specifically California. He also says “we” in the sentence “In all this time we've been talking about high-speed rail” and does not mean Chinese/Japanese/French having this discussion.
Disingenuous speaks to the motivation of the speaker, not the veracity of information on its own. Vance says that in his opinion that that particular interpretation of the factual information is disingenuous. As you pointed out, it can mean “unfair” which is not the same thing as untrue. Dude had an opportunity to say “that’s not true” and didn’t do that.
You’ve sort of just added “I feel like Vance meant something other than what he said” on top of Vance saying he felt like Musk meant something other than what he said. There isn’t a number of layers of “I feel…/he feels…” that you can pile onto a statement that will equal “he did not say the thing that he is quoted as having said”
Your contention is that by “accurate” he meant “inaccurate” and that he sees Elon Musk as being a global phenomenon and high speed rail as a… thing that’s local to the US? That is notable for its… absence?
Seems like “yeah that’s what he said but in my opinion you’re being mean to my friend” is more likely than a professional writer not knowing how to say “that’s not true”
It is patently clear what Musk meant, the guy isn’t famous for nuance. That aside I don’t find it difficult to picture the man that publicly claims that he personally elected the president thinking that he could sabotage a rail project. Now, I can’t know for sure that he believes that his Hyperloop pitch was responsible for the failure of the CA high speed rail project but if I had to make a bet about that…
hmm Tesla shipped millions of cars SpaceX launches 90% of space payloads, Starlink is working well. Thats hard to categorize as never delivered on any of his projects
The crucial thing is that Tesla's valuation has the hype projects baked in. The fact that it never delivered self driving or a robotaxi fleet and is now being saved solely by an import ban on Chinese EVs means that any success he had with Tesla is now an illusion.
There is another way to view this. FSD plays fast and loose because they are constantly iterating. The culture at Musk co is that if you dont' keep pushing updates you are in trouble so do we really want to trust that each of his numerous updates are truly tested? This guy is a pathological liar after all. How many lawsuits are they dealing with now?
Supercruise only runs on pre mapped routes. If my life is on the line, I'd rather take the pre mapped routes and supercruise design is better at preventing people playing games to defeat the system (ex.shoving an orange in the steering wheel) so I know that others using the system on the road are following the system guidelines.
Supercruise may not do everything FSD does but it cuts out a large portion of the "fatigue" portion of driving and as a result can be highly trusted value add.
They rolled out full driverless in Austin in November 2025 and there's a website that reverse engineered the mobile app API to track the active cars. It found 90 active in Austin with more declared total by Tesla and 150 active in SF (SF ones have a safety driver for now). Likewise they found around 300 active in SF for Waymo with around 1000 cars declared total by Waymo itself.
The projects promised to be life altering for all mankind, they ended up being not even life altering for super rich Americans considering that Teslas are just EVs which without FSD are just regular cars with a different propellent that were made for political purposes and virtue signaling
The EV revolution has always been something almost dystopic : Trillions of dollars spent in order to not have the slightest amount of quality of life improvement, if anything a worse quality of life because you buy an EV that you cannot use 24/7/365 whereas you can an ICE car for much less .
As soon as something kinda elegant and hopeful as far as collective quality of life improvement is concerned (AI/ChatGPT) came around.....the whole green/EV revolution rightfully went out the window
If Musk was this genius you guys make him to be at 50 and with all the capital he burned he should have at least one company that if you disappeared the world would look drastically different, like if you disappeared Microsoft or Apple or Exxon or Aramco or Amazon or IBM....the world would come to a screeching halt.
Disappear one of Musk companies and everything would be the same as he's always involved in these sort of aspirational companies which have this great vision always 5 years into the future that never materialize into anything tangible or that improves the quality of life like the company I mentioned earlier
well Tesla did jump start the EV revolution not life altering but is pretty important. IF SpaceX gets spaceship right that will be a huge leap forward.
Sir, your comment appears to qualify as "moving the goal post". TSLA never delivered a single inexpensive electric vehicle, and just last week abandoned all high-end efforts (S/X/CT discontinued). All TSLA manufactures now are overpriced "meh" transport boxes. Yes, TSLA was early, and now they are far, far behind the competition.
Can we evaluate based on the stated goals, or why does the criteria keep shifting?
Tesla's goal was to accelerate the world's transition to sustainable energy by building a comprehensive ecosystem of electric vehicles (EVs), solar generation, and battery storage.
I explicitly posted their stated goal and you are resorting to extreme mental gymnastics to create a straw man.
under 0.01% of all startups reach valuation of 10B
less than 0.0001% of startups reach valuation of 100B
Again, tech company, startup, visionary...all these definitions are being used but in reality we are talking about a company founded back in 2001
Also I specifically stated that people who look at valuations are those who fall for narratives as opposed to looking look the impact that a company or a product has on their lives.
I remember life before Microsoft's Windows 95, I remember life before the iPhone, before Google, I remember life before Facebook, I remember life before Amazon became ubuquitous, before Uber....
It was a completely different world, much more friction , lots of quality of life wasted by that friction.
Life before and after Tesla? It's the same....hence they failed to leave a mark on society like the aforementioned companies and fell back on financial engineering , cult leadership, cult following and politics as well as hostile takeover of the US governemnt.
You speak about valuation but if we want to use dollars as a unit of measure then what impact did Tesla have as a company on the quality of life of citizens considering the amount of capital it allocated or rather incinirated ever since 2001? Very few companies enjoyed the right to spend so much, where's the quality of life dividend for citizens?
Where's the Windows 95, where's the CHatGPT which changes things and makes people question how they managed to live productive lives before it came about? Nowhere to be seen
OK how all of these mental gymnastics relate to the claim the have not fulfilled their goals? Maybe they have not fulfilled your goals but they look to have fulfilled 2 of their 3 stated goals.
Goals are PR, In the last couple of messages you keep repeating goals , goals goals, as if their PR efforts should dictate if they are considered a success or a failure.
When you burn through hundreds of billions of dollars in capital in a very public manner you don't get to pick the goal, the goal gets to pick you and it's the following, and it's for everybody not just Musk or Tesla:
"Absolute domination in a new sector of the economy which changes the life of citizens so much so that they cannot fathom going back to life before such new tech/product' introduction and subsequent intervention of Government for Sherman act purposes / Anti Trust"
None of that will ever come to fruition as it was the wrong crusade to begin with considering that the population never really deeply wanted it and so it is being rightfully abandoned.
Considering the cultish nature of Tesla I'll make the following comparision:
If Companies logos are the new cross/star of david/ insert religious symbol then Tesla failed in their crusade.
The remains of the wrong crusade enterprise is being picked up by others who might or might not get some satisfaction and returns out if it.
there are 100+ EV models available in US. The only "blocked" entries are Chinese brands which are skirting tariffs by using owned European brands e.g. Polestar, Volvo etc.
According to google Tesla has shipped 8 million cars total since inception.
It is valued at 1.32 Trillion as of today. Which is roughly $165,000 per shipped vehicle.
Lol this is why you aren't a VC. Even if every single Musk venture failed other than SpaceX, the investments would have paid off wildly well. You aim for the tails not the median.
I'm amazed at this kind of thinking. I get it, obviously, and it's not uncommon, but still.
Elon Musk has already revolutionized three industries:
1. EVs: Before Tesla, no one thought electric cars could be a mass-market product. And even today, the Model 3 and Model Y are at the top of almost all sales lists.
2. Orbital Launch: No one expected Space X to succeed. What does a software guy know about real engineering? But today, re-usable rockets are the way of the future, and Space X is at least 5 to 10 years ahead of any other company.
3. Satellite Communications: Every single major military power is trying to deploy their own version of Starlink. Before Starlink, 50 satellites was considered a big constellation. Starlink has 8,000 satellites and they are literally launching hundreds every month.
I know it's impossible to prove a counter-factual, but I'm convinced that none of these three would have happened without Elon. No other Western car company has (even now) produced a profitable EV. No other space company has prices as low as Space X. No one even has the capability to build a Starlink competitor (not yet at least). Without Elon pushing these projects, they simply would not have happened or would have happened decades later (after China or someone else beat us to it).
Even his not-yet-successful projects are far beyond most other companies:
Boring Company has actually built tunnels and passengers are actually riding it. No one else is even trying.
Neuralink has actually helped patients.
Tesla FSD actually does work (I use it all the time), and even if Waymo is ahead, Tesla is easily in second place.
I 100% get the hatred for Elon Musk. His political positions are absolutely worth criticizing and I cringe most of the time he tweets. But to deny his business and engineering ability is just motivated reasoning.
Such illusions are ultimately self-defeating. The more opposed one is to Elon Musk (in business or politics) the more important it is to see his capabilities clearly.
> Boring Company has actually built tunnels and passengers are actually riding it. No one else is even trying.
Boring Company bought an existing tunnel boring machine (TBM), and used it to dig a car tunnel. Their only “innovation” in terms of any cost savings is to dig smaller tunnels - which we already knew could be done (tunnel cost grows with diameter), and which we don’t do for good reasons (capacity, emergency egress).
The branding and marketing exercise was excellent though.
In a way, its kind of cool to see how robber barons work in real time in our generation. Its also insanely depressing as they will systematically enshittify and extract as much wealth from society as is possible.
I don't actually think the Robber Barons in the 1920s had people going out of their way to defend them and insist they had special knowledge.
The New Deal happened with massive popular support because people did not like the Barons, and wanted to stop them and actually have a life worth living.
The Robber Barons weren't in the 1920s; that refers to industrial age monopolists (e.g. rail/oil), and culminated in the Sherman Antitrust (i.e. 1800s).
Broadly, your point is still valid, though. Just a mild inaccuracy between the Gilded Age and the roaring 20s.
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