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by JumpCrisscross 964 days ago
> he has a history of making bold claims about his products that either never come to fruition

To my knowledge, he has never lied about the present financial state of his companies. That gives him credibility in a way e.g. Yaccarino bullshitting about what fraction of Twitter’s advertisers have returned does not.

3 comments

Then a jury ruled in Musk's favor, right?

https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/03/cars/musk-tesla-tweet-lawsuit...

The end result is left out every time the "court finds" articles are linked. The jury found the opposite, which is what actually matters.

The jury finding was that he was not personally liable for investor losses, not that his tweet was in fact accurate.

The facts are not in dispute here. He tweeted "funding secured" and funding was not secured. He announced intentions to take it private at a given price, which did not happen.

He misrepresented the financial state of his company.

Musk was railroaded by the judge and the Saudis on that one.

Luckily the jury had sense that the tweet was harmless in the end.

The judge ignored his stake in SpaceX he could have leveraged and mainly the Saudi Arabia firm that he was in talks with in taking Tesla private would not testify and then said the exact opposite:

https://www.theverge.com/2022/4/25/23040961/elon-musk-saudi-...

https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2023/1/23/musk-on-trial-sa...

So in the end it's do you believe Elon or the Saudis?

The judge sided with the Saudis.

Well, a jury also ruled that his pedo comments were totally okay, so I don't know if I'd use that as a metric for what constitutes truth.
Well, courts have also persecuted and jailed innocent people so if you don't trust what a jury of your peers say you should also have a hard time trusting what a "court finds".

Do you agree with that logic or do you trust the courts over your peers?

(ie. what "metric" would you use "for what constitutes truth"?)

Timely! Now do the courts (or have those been perfect over the decades?)

Under that logic, maybe Musk is just another African American being persecuted by the US government.

Jury is mob-based justice. If mobs likes you, then you are basically immune to consequences as illustrated by the link above.
You ignored my statements. Evaluate the courts.

We're all waiting on the edge of our seats to know what your ideal judicial system is.

Btw you've never had jury duty? Did you vote in a mob form? I sure hope not. I haven't.

> Jury is mob-based justice

Have you served on an American jury?

I'm mostly neutral in all things Musk. I can make arguments without appealing to his virtue or criticizing his flaws.

I've been reading about low-orbit satellite since at least the late 1990s when it must have been Slashdot articles then. There have been several plans, but the one whose name I remember was Iridium. I believe it became operational, but only ever managed to be used for voice telephony. It's been bankrupted and bought by other companies since then.

This is an absurdly difficult market to break into, and everyone has failed to one degree or another, with the degrees of failure all clustering around the really extreme end of that spectrum. This is ignoring any technological challenge (of which there are apparently more than a few).

He is claiming to have done a (business) thing that has been demonstrated to be nearly impossible. A thing which, if he hasn't done it and is merely lying about, we might not know for months or years.

It is perfectly reasonable to be skeptical of this, and no one owes him the benefit of doubt on this issue or any other. It is perfectly reasonable to remain skeptical even if you do not believe the man a liar. It is an extraordinary claim, and requires extraordinary evidence.

See: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:...

Capital Raise

4,281 days since Elon Musk said Tesla will never need to raise capital again. (2/12/2012)

"Tesla does not need to ever raise another funding round." Elon Musk, quoted by John Voelcker in Green Car Reports

4,052 days since Elon Musk raised $195.7M in common stock. (9/28/2012)

3,822 days since Elon Musk raised $313M in common stock. (5/16/2013) 3,822 days since Elon Musk raised $600M in convertible notes. (5/16/2013)

[...]

1,157 days since Elon Musk raised $5B in common stock. (9/1/2020)

1,059 days since Elon Musk raised $5B in common stock. (12/8/2020)

With Tesla stock as overvalued as it is, he'll be really dumb to not sell issue more. Tesla is the original meme stock: if people are willing to pay much more for AMC/BBBY/whatever meme stock than it would otherwise be worth, you should get in front of the money printing machine and issue more stock. Good for him.