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SimianSciyesterday at 10:21 PM7 repliesview on HN

The Goalpost shift continues, If elon were working for me, I would have fired him for having never delivered on any of his projects.

Hyperloop > Neuralink > Self-Driving Cars > Robotaxi fleets > Personal Robots > Orbital Datacenters > [Insert next]


Replies

reisseyesterday at 10:42 PM

> If elon were working for me, I would have fired him for having never delivered on any of his projects.

Never? For the sheer amount of moonshot bets he's doing, his track record would make any VC jealous. Zip2, PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX, Grok/xAI.

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TehCorwizyesterday at 10:41 PM

Hey now. Huperliop was designed to scuttle California’s light rail project. Which it did. Mission accomplished.

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qaqyesterday at 10:40 PM

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

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tuhgdetzhhyesterday at 10:35 PM

Yeah, but there are enough people to buy the hype.

claaamsyesterday at 11:08 PM

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.

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GMoromisatotoday at 1:09 AM

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.

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henry2023today at 1:28 AM

The guy also was super excited to go rap3 some k1ds in the island. Gladly he also failed at this.