[johnfn]

Are you sure about your first assertion? It is well known that HN is gratuitously negative about everything. SpaceX is the exception, rather than the rule - and you'd be hard pressed to find another company with quite such a positive reputation on HN.

[rtpg]

Personally, I think the causality here is flipped.

People by default will be excited about stuff that's "good news". But the community is pretty big, so there will usually be a set of people that see an issue, and comment on it.

So in the end many things coming through will be negative or cynical. The fact that people tend not to just comment "neat" but will write the paragraphs of research saying how X is wrong doesn't help in the impressions. But for things like research papers, most people tend to just comment on the contents.

I think the reason so few companies on HN have this reputation is because many of these companies are problematic. Google is the symbol of ad networks. Facebook does a bunch of privacy-busting stuff. Amazon exploits many workers on the lower end and it's not certain that their monopoly will be benificial in the future.

If anything I think it's an indictment on the kind of company that succeeds in SV (and, well, capitalism). I think we all remember old "do no evil" Google financing a bunch of awesome stuff. And when they turned out to be like every other company.... well that sucks.

Inversely loads of smaller businesses tend to get a lot of good press on this website, because people can see the passion and the "not about quarterly revenue" attitude.

[ethbro]

I attribute SpaceX and Tesla love to the "ask a kindergartner what they want to be" phenomenon.

Everyone, regardless of field, can relate to rockets and cars.

Far fewer people would relate to, say, optimizing insurance benefit payments.

[jschwartzi]

It's deeper than that. People here like Tesla because it's forcing other car makers to build decent electric cars. That's something that needs to happen if we're going to move away from fossil fuel dependence.

SpaceX is cool because there's a really good chance they'll be more successful at missions to the moon and Mars than NASA has been recently. They're both forward-thinking companies.

[ethbro]

My point being there are thousands of companies doing interesting and "good" things. But Tesla and SpaceX definitely seem to get more of a positive reaction than the others.

Not saying they aren't doing good things. But they get more credit than the good things they're doing would merit. And probably more than even effective PR can explain.