Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by tw04 19 days ago
SpaceX needs to claim there’s a need for 100k more satellites to prop up unreasonable valuations. This is no different than Elon claiming Tesla owners would be renting out their cars as FSD taxis while at work (next year, we swear guys!!!)

In a functioning economy he’d have faced criminal charges for knowingly misleading investors and customers about a dozen times over by now. It’s one thing to set lofty goals internally to keep your workforce motivated and innovative. It’s something else entirely to state things publicly with a targeted date when you know there’s absolutely no chance it will ever happen.

5 comments

I believe he said Teslas are meant to appreciate in value too because you get income from renting them out when you're not using your car. They'll just drive around and work as a taxi while you're not using it.

He's more sci-fi author than CEO at this point.

> He's more sci-fi author than CEO at this point.

L. Ron Hubbard comes to mind.

Now trying to imagine John Travolta portraying Musk.
That's a fine take in my book. The cultleader vibe and endless fanboys..
Turo (then Relayrides) partned with GM to allow you to rent your own vehicle out while you were at work or anywhere, so it's not science fiction, it was done back in 2012 and the concept was the same, your vehicle will help pay for itself.

Every mile logged by autonomous driving, every accident caused by a human vs autonomous vehicle where the human is at fault, will make insurance companies price risks accordingly. So far, autonomous vehilces doing very well in the cities where they operate.

It's inevitable these two concepts will merge, and it solves many problems with lack of access to affordable transportation especially for those who can't drive. Public transportation can't survive on fixed route, major infrastructure spends like rail and bus and meet the needs of the greatest number of people.

That will not work for a long time for peak hours and remote areas with too little of customers.

Everyone has to travel into our city in the morning to work, everyone does it with their own car they are proud of and see as essential at the same time while standing in traffic for 20-30 minutes extra.

And then what do you get? You get YOUR car back, smelly, stinky, dirty for saving a little bit of money?

We already have a 'drive yourself' car rentel system here and the lowest price for an avg car is 8 Euros per Hour for the time and 40 cents for 1km.

I also don't think insurance will be that much cheaper for autonomous driving. The insurance for a normal car is not expensive already, we have very few car incidents.

It might even become more expensive because you are driving more km per year.

If Bitcoin...that has nothing behind it, can´t realistically be used for financial transactions, and is essentially just a virtual NFT... can hold at $60,000 for years, So then....SPCX that has nothing behind it, and realistically will never offer any business value that is even 0,01% of expectations...can then certainly hold at $150 for years...
Starlink is legitimately bandwidth saturated in a lot of places though. I think the need is demonstrable.
Would you feel the same way if he attached good faith probability estimates to those claims?
I think there would be no point in making the claim if the probability estimates were truly in good faith.
Apple announced AirPower and then didn’t end up shipping it. In a “functioning economy” should Tim Cook be indicted for misleading investors? Obviously not.

The only decent argument for the criminal case you are talking about would be if it was an outright lie with no intent whatsoever to deliver on the promise, but there’s obviously a huge effort to deliver on the robotaxi promise. Just ask any of the thousands of employees who work on the Tesla robotaxi and self driving software every day, just visit Austin and observe the ubiquitous cybercabs driving around the city.

They obviously haven’t realized the dream yet but it doesn’t mean that they won’t eventually, especially when you can physically see the progress first hand.

Your argument seems mostly driven by your disagreement with the founder’s politics instead of any rational argument against their technology.

AirPower would've been a fraction of a fraction of a single percentage point of Apple's accessory sales

Apple is facing a multi-million dollar lawsuit over Siri features it promised, that it would not charge for or make money off of, but didn't deliver

As the comment you are replying to does not, on its face, seem to have a political bia you should be explicit about where/how you identified that bias. Without this you are the one injecting politics not the OP.
> > Apple announced AirPower and then didn’t end up shipping it. In a “functioning economy” should Tim Cook be indicted for misleading investors? Obviously not.

Apple doesn't have a history of having to pump the stock to survive. Also it's a pretty ubiquitous company and they delivered a pretty life changing product for all of us.

On the other hand Tesla has a history of lying constantly and also life and customer experience is pretty much the same in the sectors of the economy that they attacked , as a matter of fact a 2002 Mercedes (the year in which Tesla was founded) is better in many departments compared to a 2026 Tesla

No Lidar, no chance…
> disagreement with the founder’s politics

Are you talking about the guy who did a double-down Nazi salute to celebrate Trump winning the election?