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by jackmott42 1319 days ago
There has been this kind of rhetoric around Elon things a lot. "Wheres the reusuable booster?" "Where is the model 3?" "Haha the model 3 is in a tent".

Meanwhile the model 3 and Y dominate world EV sales, and the reusable boosters have become a boring part of weekly life.

I'm not sure I would interpret Elons aspirational predictions as lack of involvement. It isn't unusual to publicly push for the impossible in the hopes you get close to it. Coaches and managers all do this.

3 comments

Coaches and managers probably do not have the Mythical Man-Month on their bookshelf. Musk and his advisors almost definitely do.

In any case, coaches that make these kinds of announcements several times and fail to achieve them, do not stay in the job very long. In Musk's case, this is immaterial as he has rigged the Tesla board with loyalists and family members.

Most managers I know have the mythical man month in their bookshelf.
The question is where do Mr Musks claims become similar to Ms Holmes?

He promised a lot and the team delivered part of it.

People are making investments based on him saying that he’ll have mass production of a personal robot in a few years. If that robot can’t water the plants in my house, then his recent demo was a lie.

I’m not wanting to pull him down, but Tesla is over valued and a potential house of cards. Having more realistic targets means it’s easier to beat expectations.

> Meanwhile the model 3 and Y dominate world EV sales,

They are the top two models, but they don’t dominate the market: BYD sells more EVs (mix of PHEVs and BEVs) than Tesla, but makes mamy more models. Tesla’s models “dominate” the EV market no more than Apple’s have historically “dominated” the desktop PC market.

For those (like me) who had to look up "BYD":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BYD_Auto

> The company has mainly based its sales in Mainland China, but is undertaking rapid expansion into the global market, with sales hitting over 100,000 per month in March 2022, and is expecting to sell between 1.5 million to 2 million plug-in EVs in 2022, around 3 to 4 times the volume in 2021. In June 2022, BYD Auto announced that it had sold about 641,000 EVs in the first half of 2022, overtaking Tesla to become the largest EV manufacturer in the world.