Whoa. So he's diverting employees and equipment from investor backed SpaceX, to a side venture where he owns 90% of the equity?
This is sketchy fiduciary duty. Right up there when he bailed out his brother's SolarCity by having Tesla buy it because every car manufacture needs to get into the rooftop solar business.
You're being voted down by the Tesla brigade, but you are absolutely right. Given the de minimis SpaceX equity in BoringCo, Musk's use of SpaceX resources without compensation by BoringCo is a flagrant violation of his fiduciary duties to SpaceX's investors.
That's why it's been so important to him to keep his boards stocked with friends and family--an actual corporate board of directors would have sent him to the curb long ago.
The Boring Company is on really shaky ground after the entrance cave in back on Dec 5th and construction setbacks. It'll be interesting to see if they survive, they're still in live or die startup mode.
We've had a few tunnels built around my city. It transpired through every one of those projects: late, ended up bankrupt, rebought, refinanced, ended up expensive to users. I mean they still made them and they work, well, but $10 a toll :)
Presumably everything else is on track, but when it comes to geotechnical engineering, stabilizing earth is challenging, and the engineers appear to want to wait more than 3 or 4 days after the cave-in to see if their method of stabilization (whether they used these neat ground screws, thicker walls, or a pairing) is stable and ready for non-employees to be near.
That article mentions absolutely nothing about a cave in. I wasn't disputing the delay thing (definitely an issue with any project of Musk's), but claiming that there was a cave in requires a legitimate source.
I did more research and still came up blank - I saw a number of headlines talking about "boring company caves in" - but they use it as a metaphor for them abandoning plans to extend the tunnel significantly. Not an actual cave in.
Because there have not been any serious reports of fraud and abuse, and the things he built are so important for the future of humanity, that even much more serious accusations won't change the total balance to a negative for Musk.
There have been dozens of articles detailing fraud and abuse at Tesla, quite a few articles about Boring Co's liberties with the truth and its outright lies to the people in the neighborhood where the tunnel is being built. SolarCity's financials were so bad they went through multiple auditing firms before they found one that would sign off on them.
All in all, Musk's companies have an above-average incidence of ethics- and truth-related issues.
I recently traveled to Florida and met with my cousin that has friends at SpaceX. The joke is to call it SlaveX. According to him, it pays quite a bit better than ULA, but there’s huge burnout and turnover.
> Why is there a cult following when fraud and employee abuse is common?
Musk can present an image of a successful multiple entrepreneur who is working towards a vision that many support arrayed against a forces of Big Bad Incumbents who would rather squash him than compete fairly. Thus he is responsible for all the good things, and the bad things are just smear campaigns that should be ignored.
Essentially, it's the same force that fuels the rise of people like Trump, just applied to a different part of the political spectrum.
It's because Musk has cultivated a tech-god image for the last decade.
From cameos in movies and tv shows to projects like SpaceX that were created solely to boost his "genius" image, Musk (or his publicists) have done everything to make him seem like a superhuman.
Serious question. Do you mean like a physical barrier? Similar to absconding to New Zealand when SHTF and it’s TEOTWAWKI? In a very real sense, Mars is the ultimate gated community.
What do they think The Boring Company is really for? And Tesla, and Solar City for that matter.
Uh huh. Sure it is. That would explain why Solar City has thus far failed to account for the significantly reduced amount of solar energy that reaches Mars. Solar cells can't charge EVs fast enough on Earth. With the same panel area, it would take most of a Martian year to charge a single EV on Mars.
But as with the hyperloop, Musk has done a great job of getting people to fall for his half-assed fantasies. Somehow though, whenever you actually try to look into his ideas with more scrutiny, they always fall apart like a house of cards.
That would explain why Solar City has thus far failed to account for the significantly reduced amount of solar energy that reaches Mars. Solar cells can't charge EVs fast enough on Earth. With the same panel area, it would take most of a Martian year to charge a single EV on Mars.
What are you talking about? Solar can charge an electric car just fine. Take desired charge rate in kW, divide by nameplate power output of panel, and that's how many panels you need. If you live somewhere with constraints on solar input (eg reduction due to clouds, distance from sun, or night) then you can increase the panel amount, maybe add some stationary batteries to timeshift the input.
Edit: not meant as a personal attack at all, but noticed your other comments around the thread are loose enough with the facts. Musk could learn a thing or two :)
Their profile says they don't read comment threads after 4 hours, so I didn't think they will see. But my mention of "being loose with the facts" and "Musk could learn a thing or two" was referring to another post of theirs where they said:
There have been [...] quite a few articles about Boring Co's liberties with the truth and its outright lies to the people in the neighborhood where the tunnel is being built - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18704761
I thought this was, itself, misleading - I follow the Boring Co pretty closely, and I only saw one negative article re: the local neighbourhood around the test tunnel - and said article was mostly raising the plight of the locals with the airport/highway/industrial activity in the area. The Boring Company was only attacked as a bit of a bogeyman.
Combine that with this sentence in their original post, which I did already call out for being flagrantly misleading:
Solar cells can't charge EVs fast enough on Earth. With the same panel area, it would take most of a Martian year to charge a single EV on Mars
The only way I can see that being true is if it's talking only about solar cells on the roof of the vehicle (which no one technically minded should expect to power a car).
From a pro-Tesla site. It would take 75 solar panels to charge a single Tesla in a day. Max theoretical efficiency on Mars is roughly 1/15th of Earth norm, not taking into account Martian weather, and assuming you are always somehow directly facing the sun the entire Martian day. Take weather and the day-night cycle into account, and it takes about a Martian year to charge one Tesla.
Google is your friend. A single search on Boring Co shows at least a dozen articles about their misrepresentative claims, so I assume the Google personalization filter is effecting both of our search results.
This is sketchy fiduciary duty. Right up there when he bailed out his brother's SolarCity by having Tesla buy it because every car manufacture needs to get into the rooftop solar business.