My cognitive dissonance is strong when it comes to Elon. I have trouble sometimes reconciling the obvious flaws in his character on the one hand (though none of us are without flaws) and his extraordinary achievements on the other.
He can be a bit of a dick, yes. He exaggerates, yes.
He's also in my view one of the most talented and inspirational entrepreneurs of our generation.
I don't see how people can call him an outright fraud with a straight face when you look at what he has delivered through Tesla and SpaceX.
But he seems to elicit strong polarised opinions. And I get it. Lot's of noise about FSD, his constantly slipping timelines etc.
He might be a very effective marketer and manager, but he gets credit for so so much more than that. Like he singlehandedly made electric cars a thing. It's the Great Man theory of history.
Even then, effective marketing are often lies, so why value effective marketing? Effective management is so often toxic, so why value effective management? As far as I can tell, he's full of BS and his employees are treated poorly, so I really don't care so much that he's first to market.
This is the sort extreme polarised view I was referring to. All I can say is NASA doesn't agree with you on this.
The problem is, if you go straight to "he's full of BS" it just kills all sensible debate. He's clearly not full of BS. He's delivering astronauts to the Space Station via his "startup". This is not something someone "full of BS" achieves.
You're misunderstanding what I mean. Very uncharitably, if you think I somehow missed the fact he's delivering astronauts to the ISS and delivering cars. For god's sake, I agreed with you that he's very effective! You're seeing a much more "extreme polarized" statement that I wrote.
I'm not saying every single thing he says is BS, like he's going around saying the sky is green and up is down. Just that he says a whole lot of shit that isn't true also.
He can be an impressive engineer and entrepreneur while also being a jerk. I think it's ok to condemn his behaviors when they're out of line while also admiring the progress him and his companies have made in the industries they've targeted.
I feel like I've seen this before. A man is a relentless and masterful self-promoter, encourages a very public cult of personality, and puts out what are broadly considered superior products from his companies. He's also an egotistical prick.
I think it’s political tribalism more than anything else? It’s become more clear after this SNL thing.
On Twitter people on the left claim vaguely that Elon is bad and why is SNL doing this etc.
People on the right say Elon is great and SNL is normally unfunny.
In the former case I think it’s just because people associate Elon with the right for some reason.
The latter is easier to understand since a lot of SNL’s humor is explicitly political (not in a bad way imo).
Part of me wonders if the irreverent tweets were an intentional way to broaden his appeal. He needed EVs to go from “liberal” Prius symbols about the environment to cool.
That’s a Herculean task when you think about it. Even now there are still coal rolling truck drivers yelling at EVs, but the sentiment has definitely changed in a positive way.
He did this without having to embrace trump (unlike Thiel for instance).
I think his biggest miss was on covid, but he seems to agree that he was wrong.
I suspect a part of the left dislike is also around the progressive anti-billionaire/anti-capitalist sentiment, it makes Elon an easy “enemy”.
Putting all this aside and looking at what he’s building - it’s an exciting time to be alive. Most companies are fairly dull doing fairly dull things. Elon takes huge risks to try to pull the future down earlier. For the most part, he succeeds.
I think Elon's association with the right is largely due to his dudebro persona. He's what you get if you gave your average Rogan listener billions of dollars, a deep well of conviction, and an exceptional mind.
Among the political commentariat on the left, this kind of person is a Neanderthal that should be relegated to the dustbin of history.
For a lot of people on the outside of that demographic, he's just a fun, brilliant, if occasionally douchy guy who's way less out of touch than his billionaire contemporaries, and actually works to build neat things.
> “ For a lot of people on the outside of that demographic, he's just a fun, brilliant, if occasionally douchy guy who's way less out of touch than his billionaire contemporaries, and actually works to build neat things.”
Yeah - this is basically my take, and stated better than I did in my comment.
It is more that Elon does not associate himself with fashionable left wing causes. No kneeling photo-ops in SpaceX headquarters, no programs tailored to recruit specifically non-Asian non-whites etc.
In contemporary culture, that is enough to be considered right wing. Neutrality slowly ceased to be an option.
There are literally photo ops in spacex hqs! And a very publicized program dedicated to hiring engineers of color, and women. Whatever you might think of spacex, for the aerospace industry its batshit insane left wing (in this case mostly because of Gwynn Shotwell)
> I suspect a part of the left dislike is also around the progressive anti-billionaire/anti-capitalist sentiment, it makes Elon an easy “enemy”.
He IS an easy enemy in this regard, not only to the left. All his (mis)behaviour, naming his child like that, manipulating currency rates through tweets, that's not exactly what average people could afford. If he didn't fit this stereotype of billionaire, I'm sure he would be liked more.
The child name thing seemed more likely Grimes than Elon?
Even so I just don’t think these things are a big deal? I also don’t agree with the anti-billionaire/anti-capitalist sentiment though.
It’s just odd to me given how much he’s done to aid the transition to EVs and renewable energy. I guess it’s not a huge surprise, people are wildly inconsistent around tribal issues.
I didn't realize how good Teslas had gotten until I had the chance to spend significant time in one. Their insane acceleration was always apparent, but they've gotten really good in other ways as well.
They've had a chance to do a clean sheet rethinking of cars, and it works wonderfully well. If you have your phone on you, you just walk up to the car and the door is unlocked and on by the time you touch it. There's no "start" button, you just press the brake, push the mode stalk to drive or reverse, and go. When you walk away, the car locks itself silently and turns off. Depending on whose key it depends, the seat, steering wheel, and mirrors are adjusted by the time you sit down.
There's no "idling" to keep the AC on, so there's no guilt about doing it. They've recently added a very efficient heat pump that shares loops with the battery so the heat doesn't drain much, either. We spent an hour in the car with AC on recently, it used about 1 mile of range.
I thought I'd hate the touchscreen controls, but what I didn't realize was that you generally don't need to use them while driving. Wipers and climate are automatic and work well, so there's no real need to adjust them. The voice control is incredibly good, and seems to have access to almost every non-driving setting. Press a button on the steering wheel, and speak "Set wipers to auto", "I'm cold", "Play Spanish Moon by Little Feat", "Navigate home". They all work as you'd expect.
Jury is still out on "autopilot", lane following and dynamic cruise control are fine, but the onscreen world representation (cars, especially) is very jittery. I guess not too surprising, it's a DNN making guesses about the state of the world, but I'm surprised there's not a more persistent context vector between states. If it's very sure about a car being there in frames 1-10, it should really not expect that car to just blip out of existence in frame 11.
But overall, I'm extremely impressed, and I think I'll have a hard time going back to cars by traditional automakers. The impression is of a holistic design that's extremely well integrated, rather than the impression of a hodge podge of poorly integrated new and old systems that I've gotten with any car with an "infotainment" system that I've ever used.
I have been driving two Teslas over the last few years. I find that their voice recognition to be roughly 75-85% accurate.
More important, the manuals for the cars have not correctly described operation of voice commands for over a year. This speaks volumes to the software culture at Tesla. If you can't make the code conform to the documentation, you really can't trust the code.
I've had my Model X for almost three years now. I find the voice control to be almost completely unusable. Seems to be something about my voice, though I have a fairly typical American accent so I'm not sure what. I demonstrated the issue to a technician when I took it in for unrelated service, thinking it might be a faulty microphone, but it worked fine for him.
Definitely one of the most disappointing features of the car, which I generally love driving.
Nothing that the users do will correct a company culture that actually has the wrong way to operate the car described in its manuals. This is the kind of communication that pervades the company, top to bottom. I don't know if they fail to understand how their cars work, or if they deliberately exaggerate.
Ah I thought that you meant the commands weren’t listed. What are they incorrectly describing? I’ve seen some other examples of this (notably, the getting started tutorials mention getting to the manual via a Tesla T at the top of the touchscreen, which has gone missing).
Model X Owners Manual October 2020 (2020.44) manual, page 53 -- and the corresponding page in the Model S Owners Manual. Tesla changed the operation of their voice command button around December of 2019. The manual describes two ways to signal a complete command has been vocalized -- but only one truly works. Since the 'update notes' are extremely sparse, there was never a hint in the car's instrument cluster explanation of the update, that Tesla had removed the protocol for invoking the voice commands.
If Tesla will 'forget' to tell you that a feature is removed, or changed, then expect similar behavior around edge conditions for FSD if it ever materializes. For example, a number of different protocols could be added, tried, removed revolving around contention at 4-way stop signs. If the update notes are silent on FSD adopted behavior, a lot of annoyance and potential hazards will be created.
Have you actually driven new comparably priced cars by "traditional automakers"? There's not many things where Tesla is actually significantly ahead Audi, BMW and Mercedes.
It’s hard to give a fair evaluation of whether something is good when there is no suitable comparison.
The rest of the car industry is starting to get a clue and catch up, but the Model S had no comparable competition when it came out. It wasn’t like trading a few dollars or features for a Lexus vs. the same class of Mercedes, the Model S created its own class.
And SpaceX is the same story. It vastly changed the space launch landscape, and isn’t done yet. Falcon 9 has no real competition until Vulcan has a successful launch. Falcon Heavy’s only competition is Delta IV Heavy, which is at the end of its life and all remaining launches are booked. Starship and Super Heavy could maybe be compared to SLS, but that’s kind of insulting when you consider the budget and track record of both programs.
I guess my point is that while Elon does over-promise and doesn’t have a perfect hit rate, the main products have still really embarrassed the established players in each industry.
Vulcan and Falcon 9 does not compete in the same league. Vulcan exists as a backup choice for the US government to have guaranteed access to space. All commercially relevant features regarding reusability to get the costs even close to Falcon 9 have been shelved for years. For example the "SMART Reuse" they touted when announcing the rocket.
Yeah it’s really good. Yes, he also exaggerates (or more accurately I think is too ambitious about timelines).
It makes him miss sometimes, but it also is the reason SpaceX is where it is and they can turn around a rocket insanely quickly.
He sets crazy goals and even their “failures” are still 10x better than the rest of the market.
His plan for the company’s future is clear. The roadster -> S -> 3 worked, building out the charger network worked, the other vehicles and best-in-class software were really a bonus.
During all of this the competition and the press ranged from ignoring them to directly hostile.
People complained about why charging was less viable than gas for years, Tesla built out the charging network and fixed it.
Dealerships in the US fought for their rent seeking protections and local power - tesla fought them and won.
I think when nearly everyone is driving an EV within the next 20 years, people will look back on that NYT story where they intentionally killed the battery so they could have a cover story of a model S on a tow truck and will recognize it for what it was.
Those self-landing Falcon rockets don't impress you? Those capabilities sounded like exaggerated concepts not too long ago. Tesla cars and solar -- truly helping humanity move from fossil fuels (truly like in reality, at large scale), and now StarLink... Yeah, I'd say his outcomes are pretty good.
Musk makes Jobs and Gates look like under-achievers.
I've watched a decent amount of Jobs interviews, and I think you are down-playing the importance of this effect. He was a jerk, but he could spot talent, feverishly go after it, and then allow it to shine by giving it some of the most impactful problems that humanity is facing. Somehow he was able to wield a big company like most people could only handle small companies.
I don't know how many people have this skill, and you first require to have a ton of capital at hand to make use of it, but of the people in the world who have that capital this skill seems rather rare.
Quite. When he said on SNL "I re-invented electric cars", I thought yes, you and 1000s of very smart engineers at Tesla did, not you alone.
The leaders at the top of these companies get way too much credit for "having the vision". The vision too mostly likely came from many individuals who are not in the limelight and don't have the connections nor the cash.
Musk otherwise comes across as vulgar and insecure.
I used to get bothered by this as well, but you’ve got to get over it. Most of the time the thousands of people don’t want to be in the limelight and it is better for the product/company to have a good and smart leader out there touting it without saying every single time that actually they didn’t do that much and Bill and Mary and Chloe and 500 other people actually did all the work.
Look, we all know Musk and other CEOs didn’t invent these products/ideas on their own but storytelling is a big part of leadership.
Those rockets impress me, but Elon Musk did not construct them. The NASA (and also the soviet union) managed to do equally great things without someone like him in past.
> Tesla cars -- truly helping humanity move from fossil fuels
It would be much more effective to use bicycle and trains wherever possible, and drive small cars otherwise. But wait ... that's not luxurious enough. Saving the world is just an excuse for cool cars.
> and now StarLink
... to make the last corner of the world addicted to the internet and pay money to Musk.
The true achievement is not the capability of the rockets, it is the huge reduction in cost compared to government contracts. This is even excluding the reusability.
The development costs for Falcon 9 v1.0 were approximately US$300 million, and NASA verified those costs. If some of the Falcon 1 development costs were included, since F1 development did contribute to Falcon 9 to some extent, then the total might be considered as high as US$390 million.[14][2]
NASA also evaluated Falcon 9 development costs using the NASA‐Air Force Cost Model (NAFCOM)—a traditional cost-plus contract approach for US civilian and military space procurement—at US$$3.6 billion based on a NASA environment/culture, or US$$1.6 billion using a more commercial approach.[15][14]
We were never talking about costs, we were talking about how visionary Elon Musk is. However, while it's great if money is saved, again: is it really the achievement of Elon Musk, or would any private company be able to hold down costs?
"would any private company be able to hold down costs?"
Most space startups died without ever reaching orbit. One of the reasons why SpaceX has such a reputation is precisely that it stands so far apart from its competition.
I love trains, and would love to see proper high speed rail in the US, but let's be honest, that's primarily a political problem, and I don't expect to see it within the next 30 years.
Yes but they were working with first of its kind technology from ~50years ago and could launch 7 astronauts. That it was expensive doesn't make SpaceX first.
The cost is literally the entire point of reusability, though. In case of Space Shuttle, the reusability of orbiter module achieved very little - between inspections and fixups of the orbiter, rebuilding SSME, building new external tanks, and expensive refurbs of the SRBs (where it was arguably cheaper to build new ones - a dip in salt water is very bad for rockets), the whole program was so expensive that the US would've been better off launching people in throwaway return capsules on regular rockets.
Meanwhile, SpaceX is actually landing the rocket in upright position. No salt water dip. The whole rocket is so cheap and procedure is so normalized that by this point, most people have lost count as to how many flights a given F9 first stage already had. I think they've already flown at least one booster 6 times. This is how true reusability looks like - saving money, increasing cadence, and well on its way towards the ultimate goal: being able to land a rocket, refuel it, and launch it again, all within couple hours at most.
Cost is not the entire point of reusability, especially the first to substantially pull it off (Space Shuttle). Demonstrating and developing the technology is part of it too. Starship for example will use ceramic tiles, not identical with, but still proved out by Space Shuttle, which used them first.
You are also comparing amortized program cost of space shuttle and not final marginal cost (around $450million per launch at 7 astronaut capacity and higher payload capacity).
He can be a bit of a dick, yes. He exaggerates, yes.
He's also in my view one of the most talented and inspirational entrepreneurs of our generation.
I don't see how people can call him an outright fraud with a straight face when you look at what he has delivered through Tesla and SpaceX.
But he seems to elicit strong polarised opinions. And I get it. Lot's of noise about FSD, his constantly slipping timelines etc.
I guess it depends what you choose to focus on.