It’s amazing how he’s so far managed to avoid repercussions from his outright lies and deceit. The biggest example being Tesla full self driving that has been promised for years and never materialised.
If you get caught lying, it will eventually cost you $X in penalties. However, it will take years for you to pay that fine. Just lie in such a way that your stock growth outpaces the inevitable penalties.
This doesn’t work for promises with concrete deadlines, but the beauty of self driving cars is that they’ve been “a few years away” for about 30 years. So when the penalties come, he can get a slap on the wrist for merely being optimistic.
The latest version is really good, considering. Drives roughly like a bottom 20th-percentile driver.
I use it 100% of the time that nobody is behind me. The worst thing is how it handles stop signs… it actually stops at the stop sign, then rolls forward slowly to where a human would actually stop.
(Note: I got it back when FSD was substantially cheaper; I don’t think it is work the $12k it is today)
Phantom slowdown doesn’t really happen anymore. I primarily don’t do it because of the stop sign issue and sometime some turn signaling without changing lanes.
So basically… embarrassment. I don’t mind it driving like an old person, but I’m embarrassed to be seen as driving that way.
Maybe due to Phantom breaking? that's the #1 issue I've seen with Enhanced Autopilot and it's terrifying when it happens.
I've never had issues with lane changes or general driving, but the phantom breaking (where the car slams the breaks out of the blue) is extremely unnerving, and the main reason why I use self driving a less these days than I did in the beginning.
> biggest example being Tesla full self driving that has been promised for years and never materialised
On a philosophical level, I agree with you. As a practical matter, did anyone who actually purchased FSD feel duped? If they did, were they denied a refund?
"I bought a Model 3, taking delivery in July 2019 and paying £5800 for the FSD extra. My view was that Tesla had failed to deliver on the contract with how they described FSD at the time, and so I ended up taking them to court for £5800 plus interest and costs. Just before the court hearing was about to take place, Tesla settled with me, the core of the settlement being:
- FSD removed from my car, e.g. just standard Autopilot
Yeah I don't remember ever seeing them saying it was ready. When I bought the 3, they basically said it was a few years away and you can pre-pay now to help fund the building of FSD.
Even there, there's a lot of weasel word statements and even language on the order page that doesn't say, but heavily implies that the only hurdle is "regulatory approval, which may take longer in some jurisdictions".
> I don't remember ever seeing them saying it was ready
If you read down a bit in TFA, you'd see Elon addressing this exact issue:
"1,115 days since Elon Musk announced the FSD button and v9 of FSD would be 'uploaded' soon. (3/20/2021)"
"Given significant architectural changes, including fundamental improvements to pure vision, there is limited value to testing 8.x. Hoping to upload V9.0 & button next month." Elon Musk in a Tweet
So a year into Covid he was claiming they were a month away from FSD.
> On a philosophical level, I agree with you. As a practical matter, did anyone who actually purchased FSD feel duped?
You're confusing two entirely independent positions.
Customers buy what's on the market today. They buy the features available today, and Tesla is bounded to meet the expectations of the claims it makes regarding their current product line. As Tesla did not made any claim that their current product line ships with full self driving, and as customers made their decision based on how these products are advertised, FSD is not a factor.
Investors however are promised something entirely different. Elon Musk has been making wild claims about what products and features are just around the corner, and how fantastic they are and how they will be selling like hotcakes. Be it FSD, be it an affordable electric car, be it robocars, etc etc. Investors want returns on their investment, and they hear these outlandish promises of fantastic returns arriving just around the corner and therefore act upon these promises. But these promises end up being vaporware.
Is there a good example where FSD has risen to the level of lies (like they were never intending to build it), rather than just being typical really crappy estimation by software people? (that they were just woefully delayed in when they've actually released it). I think it's the latter since it's clear that they've been continuously working on it for years.
I opted not to buy it for exactly that reason, I just didn't believe the "coming in a couple years" – I thought we were further away from it.
> Is there a good example where FSD has risen to the level of lies
For somebody that doesn’t bat an eye at Full Self Driving™ being a proper noun that is entirely disconnected from the meaning of the words, nothing that has ever been said about it is a lie. For somebody that would expect Full Self Driving™ to actually be what it says it is, everything that’s been said about FSD has been a lie. It’s a matter of charity toward people and organizations that regularly tell you incorrect things and a flexibility around the definition of words.
I’m sure I could come up with many other examples. The meta issue is that if you blow past estimates multiple times, you should at minimum stop providing estimates because you’re very bad at it. If you keep providing estimates that happen to prop up your stock price, I don’t think you deserve the benefit of the doubt.
> If you keep providing estimates that happen to prop up your stock price, I don’t think you deserve the benefit of the doubt.
Especially if you are giving estimates that say "FSD, this year" while your Director of Engineering is sending memos to the California DMV saying that your statements are "not an engineering reality".
There were two elements of that demo video that were staged according to the article, the stopping at red lights and accelerating at green lights.
But isn't it true that the car did drive itself? And #2, that I can't find any claims that what you see in the video was available in Teslas at the time it was released, only that it's a future thing that's coming?
Again, I don't have FSD, and still wouldn't trust it. I'd say that EAP (Enhanced Autopilot) is basically the same it's always been, haven't noticed any meaningful improvements in 5 years. But have driven for hours on it, and I'd describe it at best as a more enhanced cruise control on highways.
Which is why I have little faith in FSD at the moment. But do want to push back a bit about what claims were made because at best, your video doesn't show that the whole thing was made up, nor that they claimed that this was ready for the masses.
Maybe there was a more damning accompanying tweet (or others) that make it more obvious.
We're getting to it, slowly but surely. Wheels of justice...
FSD is quite an amazing example indeed - they are supposedly unveiling a Robotaxi in 4 months, while he spent the past 10 years saying that each
Tesla ever produced will turn into a Robotaxi with an OTA update.
All of this is fun and games, but you can only imagine, what kind of accounting shenanigans this guy is doing behind the scenes where nobody can watch, if he's willing to lie so blatantly in the open.
If I had to wager a guess, the upcoming Robotaxi event will amount to “we’re shipping this in 2028,” and when that deadline comes and goes, the scapegoat will be government regulations.
> (...) the scapegoat will be government regulations.
That's true in a sense. The only thing that stops anyone in the world from marketing a full self driving car is the risk of being held liable for killing anyone involved directly and indirectly, including the driver/customer, in crashes caused by FSD. I mean, imagine how the fines would eat away the bottom line.
> but you can only imagine, what kind of accounting shenanigans this guy is doing behind the scenes where nobody can watch, if he's willing to lie so blatantly in the open.
Tesla released advertising in Australia that claimed that they were now the most popular selling car there, outselling the Camry. Which lead to some investigations and (Australia has some strong truth-in-advertising laws) retraction when it was shown that Tesla's definition of "sold" somehow in no way equated to the numbers of vehicles or VINs registered with the varying state databases.
Also note the non-zero numbers of "new" Teslas delivered that have been previously registered and delivered. What do we think the odds are that Tesla subtracts a sale from their numbers on returns?
I fully believe many announcements from Tesla serve no other purpose than to provide a "shield" for unlocking value from the books.
It’s interesting how the TSLA investing community is divided over FSD and Robotaxi. The more traditional investors (including most institutions) basically put little value on it, and usually send the stock tumbling when Elon utters anything that makes it seem FSD or Robotaxi are diverting resources from just plain old making plain old electric cars. Their take seems to be that while those technologies have a promising future, putting too much into them now threatens the entire company in the short term.
Meanwhile, many non-traditional investors, including the cultists that basically worship Elon, are putting everything on FSD/Robotaxi. Some of them want Elon to stop selling cars to the public altogether ASAP so he can stockpile them for the Robotaxi fleet that will surely be launched yesterday.
> Their take seems to be that while those technologies have a promising future, putting too much into them now threatens the entire company in the short term.
I don't think that's an accurate take.
What I'm seeing is increasing concerns that Tesla is even a healthy company capable of producing a decent classic car, and so far acting like a bottomless pit for resources thrown at a series personal projects that are moonshots that so far have been either failures or outright disastrous.
The cyber truck is an example, and so is Elon Musk's plans to force it to be a competitor for completely unrelated projects such as Musk's threat of creating an OpenAI competitor and even a Boston Dynamics competitor.
You have a cash cow that is drying out while being slowly and not-so-slowly milked dead, and is being killed based on a baseline of ill-advised personal projects. This is what scares investors.
I suspect a part of the problem is the they underestimated the amount of compute required.
The vehicles they’ve already shipped have about the equivalent tensor compute as an NVIDIA V100, and much less than that for older model cars.
The Bitter Lesson is that self driving AIs will probably need large scale more than anything. If we look at the capabilities of something like GPT-4V, it’s a good sign of what’s needed as the baseline minimum.
By extrapolating industry trends, I suspect that a future GPT 6 or 7 level AI with true video input might be able to be specialised to perform real time driving with human-level capability to parse complex situations such as construction sites or accident scenes.
That level of AI inference would require at least an order of magnitude more compute than what’s in any shipping Tesla, maybe more.
Elon promised something that will be possible, but not with the hardware of they day.
When Elon made his comments about “every Tesla shopping now has FSD hardware” he may have just been honestly optimistic. This was before GPT2, let alone the current state of the art. I can forgiven him for that, but not for doubling down on statements that are clearly no longer valid.
That is a remarkable, some might say delusional, level of generosity of spirit to demonstrate towards a pathological liar.
I suspect the actual problem is that Elon is a sociopath who simply does not care about honesty in any fashion and has become powerful and wealthy enough that he no longer needs to mask.
I make a conscious effort to avoid attributing the behaviour of others to malice, unless they're clearly a psychopath in the sense of literal mental illness.
People's attitude to Elon especially cracks me up. Before he acquired Twitter he could do no wrong. He was Tony Stark, and the Internet loved him. Then he fired thousands of overpaid Silicon Valley developers that were failing to properly engineer a chat platform that sends 1KB text messages, and suddenly he become the Antichrist and could do no good.
Elon has several strong personality traits that make him effective. One of these is being an technological optimist and setting aggressive timelines for his employees instead of letting things twist in the wind for decades.
E.g.: if Elon put his mind to it, he could probably get a working fusion power plant in a decade, instead of five decades like ITER. Oh sure, he might claim it'll take only three years, but that's just puffery or pep-talk.
Seriously though: if Elon went up on a stage tomorrow and claimed to have clean fusion energy solved in three years, delivered it in ten, then people like you would be on the Internet bemoaning that he's some sort of liar and a cheat because he didn't deliver as promised.
> People's attitude to Elon especially cracks me up. Before he acquired Twitter he could do no wrong. He was Tony Stark, and the Internet loved him.
In my circle of engineer friends, he was viewed as a bullshit artist long before Twitter. His fans seemed annoying, but were easy to ignore.
I feel like the perception changed when he started marketing FSD in a way that would kill people. The cave diver incident and his attitude toward Covid were big “what?” moments, and it’s accelerated downhill from there.
I think that after his bumbling of Twitter people started looking closely at his past and realized he put a ton of energy into sculpting an image detached from reality. This four part podcast does a great job looking behind the curtain: https://techwontsave.us/episode/189_elon_musk_unmasked_origi...
I'm not saying the Thailand cave diver tweets weren't... a bit too colourful for a CEO.
It's just that I wouldn't attribute that necessarily to an inherent malicious personality type.
You've got to keep in mind that at the time Elon was under enormous pressure because the Model 3 production numbers weren't up to expectations. He was working round-the-clock, sleeping in the office, and taking sleeping pills. Ambien especially is known to cause people to behave erratically.
There's a fundamental difference between leaders that are outright evil, harming others directly for their own gain, and leaders that just fucked up late at night while zonked out on medication.
Take the Sacklers for example. They knowingly, deliberately, purposefully marketed addictive painkillers to make money. They addicted hundreds of thousands of Americans to drugs, and directly killed thousands.
Elon tried to make self-driving as safe as possible. He's limited by technology, not morals.
> There's a fundamental difference between leaders that are outright evil, harming others directly for their own gain, and leaders that just fucked up late at night while zonked out on medication.
Generous to assume, given recent revelations, that prescription medication is the drug he was zonked out on while behaving erratically.
> Elon tried to make self-driving as safe as possible. He's limited by technology, not morals.
Arguably the end goal was the make billions of dollars for himself, and self-driving is the lever he found. If he was doing all this for a researcher's salary I'd have an easier time believing he was doing it for humanity's sake.
> Before he acquired Twitter he could do no wrong. He was Tony Stark, and the Internet loved him.
I used to think the same actually. But the more I looked into it, the more it turned out that it was not just thanks to his achievement. He very actively supressed every negative article or mention of him or Tesla. He apparently figured out way before the other that you can manipulate public opinion at scale through social medias. There is an army of Tesla influencers and there are numerous cases where Tesla / Elon went after critics.
Look at the story of the guy called 'Montana Skeptic' for example - a vocal and appreciated Tesla critic - in 2018 Elon reached out directly to his employer and threatened a lawsuit (without any basis for it of course).
Everyone has their limits. Elon is great at space, software and car engineering. I doubt he knows everything about batteries, ai or fusion - it wasn't much of a thing when he did his studies.
He's effective because he's used to the pain from his terrible childhood. He is almost bathing in it. Some of that pain he eventually unlashes into public. Thats when the hate towards him start.
> People's attitude to Elon especially cracks me up. Before he acquired Twitter he could do no wrong. He was Tony Stark, and the Internet loved him. Then he fired thousands of overpaid Silicon Valley developers that were failing to properly engineer a chat platform that sends 1KB text messages, and suddenly he become the Antichrist and could do no good.
Musk has been cratering his reputation with the garbage that comes out of his mouth or from his keyboard for YEARS. From "FSD. This year. For reals this time." to "It would be financially irresponsible to not own a Tesla by the end of 2019 and have a vehicle making you money as a robotaxi" to "Funding secured" to "Pedo diver".
Your attempt to frame his reputation challenges as what, a bunch of butt-hurt geeks annoyed that they or some of their peers were fired from Twitter, doesn't pass even the most trivial of sanity checks.
If you get caught lying, it will eventually cost you $X in penalties. However, it will take years for you to pay that fine. Just lie in such a way that your stock growth outpaces the inevitable penalties.
This doesn’t work for promises with concrete deadlines, but the beauty of self driving cars is that they’ve been “a few years away” for about 30 years. So when the penalties come, he can get a slap on the wrist for merely being optimistic.