[mlindner]

> I’m a little confounded that you suggest Elon believes shorting to be “morally wrong”. Why conflate his ego and financial stake with “morality”?

Because in the over ten years I have of watching what he says and what he does I've found him to be a forthright person who says what he thinks. He's not the type to intentionally deceive others. He's often wrong, but he's upfront with what he thinks. Also he's shown many times to not be interested in financial merits. He wants to achieve great things and be known for doing great things. He only cares about money in the sense that it lets him achieve the goals he wants to achieve.

> Plus, Elon has proven himself to be morally nefarious more than anything. With the law and social expectations and plenty more.

I've not seen that myself. I've seen him let his emotions get out of control many a time that he often regrets, but I've not seen him act in an explicitly nefarious way.

> The only thing I can find about Elon and his utterance of morality is him saying it was morally wrong to ban Donald Trump. What a joke.

He didn't say that it was morally wrong to ban Donald Trump. That was an oft-repeated synthesized quote that was also taken out of context. He doesn't particularly like Donald Trump at all.

[tsimionescu]

> He's not the type to intentionally deceive others.

Have you seen him tweet that he was in a deal to take Tesla private?

Have you seen his Solar Tiles marketing stunt, where he was claiming all of the houses around him had functioning solar tiles, when instead they were pure props?

Have you seen him sell FSD with a promise that it will work in 1 year, and that it will literally pay for itself by letting your car be an autonomous taxi while you are at work?

Have you seen him claim the Tesla Cybertruck will be available for pre-orders next year?

Have you seen him claim he is backing out of this Twitter deal because of the many bots on Twitter, when he was previously claiming that he is buying Twitter to fix the bot problem?

There are instances where he might have indeed believed the ridiculous promises he was making, but he has a long history of directly lying to consumers and investors to get his way or manipulate stock (or crypto) prices.

[mlindner]

> Have you seen him tweet that he was in a deal to take Tesla private?

Except he was. Have you seen the leaked tweets between him and the Saudis? He had verbal guarantees of funding and he trusted them at their word. That goes back to him being truthful, he doesn't have much ability to spot people lying to him and takes great offense at it when he finds out he was lied to.

> Have you seen his Solar Tiles marketing stunt, where he was claiming all of the houses around him had functioning solar tiles, when instead they were pure props?

It's not a marketing stunt. My friend works on them and Tesla sells them.

> Have you seen him sell FSD with a promise that it will work in 1 year, and that it will literally pay for itself by letting your car be an autonomous taxi while you are at work?

That's him being honest of his own thoughts on the matter. He keeps thinking that they're close to it being complete but then the improvement rate plateaus. He's commented as such in in interviews when asked about the repeated 1 year time periods. And the autonomous taxi is still the plan. That hasn't changed.

> Have you seen him claim the Tesla Cybertruck will be available for pre-orders next year?

Because events in the business changed. What their plans are at one point in time doesn't mean that what they say will happen.

> Have you seen him claim he is backing out of this Twitter deal because of the many bots on Twitter, when he was previously claiming that he is buying Twitter to fix the bot problem?

Except he wasn't saying he was buying Twitter to fix the bot problem. That was never the plan at all. A lot of you people have ridiculous recency bias where you completely forget the events of even a few months ago. I've seen several people in this thread state this assuredly when only a couple weeks ago we were all talking about him buying Twitter to create a internet public town square and how it was about not banning people for what they say (and people claiming how horrible this idea was), but now suddenly that's all gone and its about bots. Elon is more trustworthy than most of the posters on hacker news and reddit as at least he's consistent.

> There are instances where he might have indeed believed the ridiculous promises he was making, but he has a long history of directly lying to consumers and investors to get his way or manipulate stock (or crypto) prices.

He has a long history of making crazy predictions, and fulfilling some of them while others completely flop. A lot of people doubted that Tesla would reach 500,000 vehicles per year production rate, and yet they have, almost exactly when they planned to. Growing at a rate faster than any automotive company has grown in history. A lot of people doubted that SpaceX could re-use rockets and now they land rockets multiple times per month and re-fly them within only 2-3 weeks. A few weeks ago they launched 3 rockets (that were all being re-used) in the span of 36 hours.

(Oh and the whole supposed crypto pump and dump is a myth given that he's never come around and stopped supporting it. He's never manipulated stock prices/crypto for personal gain.)

People ignore all the promises he's fulfilled and focus on the promises that either haven't come true yet or the promises that were discarded for a better idea. The general public on the internet is incredibly disingenuous about Elon and it drives me to frustration all the time. It seems to be largely an internet problem as most people I know IRL are either neutral on him (don't really care) or like what he's done.

[zauguin]

> He's not the type to intentionally deceive others. He's often wrong, but he's upfront with what he thinks.

So when he submitted official documents that he wants to be a passive investor at Twitter while already having internal talks about buying it and/or getting a board seat he ... accidentally forgot about that?

[mlindner]

I don't think your recall of events is correct here and I'm not quite following what you're saying.

[ModernMech]

In 2016 a Tesla on autopilot mode decapitated a man because of deficiencies in its sensor stack. Rather than recalling and fixing the deficiency, Musk doubled down and refused to admit his mistake. Then, predictably, a second person got decapitated in the same exact manner. The issue still has not been fixed to this day.

Are these the decisions of a good engineer and a moral person? Or someone who would rather be right than prevent deaths?

[mlindner]

> Rather than recalling and fixing the deficiency, Musk doubled down and refused to admit his mistake.

Except they did fix the deficiency and he never "doubled down" on the events that happened. He did remind people to pay attention while driving reminding people that it was beta software. Your recollection of events seems to be mistaken. Additionally, "Recalls" are a legacy regulatory requirement based around the era that required you to take a vehicle into a service station to have something replaced or serviced. They're not required for a software update to fix some problem.

> Then, predictably, a second person got decapitated in the same exact manner.

You're going to have to source that as I'm not aware of any second instance of the exact same thing happening.

> Are these the decisions of a good engineer and a moral person? Or someone who would rather be right than prevent deaths?

They're the decisions of a person who's working toward the long term and thinks that saving lives in aggregate is a good thing to do even if in the process very few deaths of a different type are caused. Yes they're moral. By some accounts he's saved several thousand lives already in prevented car accidents based on the lower accident rate of vehicles running on autopilot.

[ModernMech]

Here you go: https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/17/18629214/tesla-autopilot-...

You could have saved yourself the trouble and done a Google search before writing all of that.

Obviously they didn’t fix the problem because it happened again. The problem wasn’t software it was hardware. Musk’s excuse was PEBCAW (problem exists between keyboard and wheel), but in reality it was his marketing and the failure of his products to live up to his own misleading hype.

And Musk did absolutely double down because he seems to have something to prove by eschewing LiDAR. The doubling down comes from the fact that the Model 3 could have corrected these issues but it didn’t. It made them worse by removing certain sensors. And again, the issue still isn’t fixed.

> They're the decisions of a person who's working toward the long term and thinks that saving lives in aggregate is a good thing to do even if in the process very few deaths of a different type are caused. Yes they're moral.

There are many such people working toward that goal, and those who are doing so earnestly aim to create a culture of safety. Musk is not one of these people. He has chosen to unleash beta quality software/machines with deficient sensor stacks onto an unsuspecting public, a public that has not agreed to his beta test. These cars are operating in stealth mode on public streets, when they should be clearly marked with flashing lights indicating that they are autonomous vehicles, as had been established as a common safety practice among autonomous car researchers for over a decade.

Musk threw out all of this and has caused literal deaths as a result. That’s on him. He ignores industry best practices for bragging rights, and he does so with no technical or engineering basis. There’s no ethical basis for it either, including your utilitarian “ends justify the means” take, because it’s quite clear at this point he will never even get to that end. He has boxed himself into a local maxima and his pride is preventing any advancement toward the safe future you imagine. Instead he’s stuck with machines that decapitated multiple people, and he can’t design one that won’t.

Musk and Tesla have been a giant step backwards for robot ethics in the industry. The whole world would be safer if he never even got the idea of autonomous cars in his brain. We were doing just fine developing safe autonomous vehicles without him. That better safer future you imagine will happen in spite of Musk, not because of him.

[sixQuarks]

That's your problem. You've actually done your research and actually listened to the man and watched how he has acted over a 10 year period, giving you much better insight than people who only read click-bait headlines. It's not even worth arguing with people who don't know what they're talking about.