History's first trillionaire is a guy who catches rockets out of the sky with chopsticks and beams internet to every dead zone on the planet.
Same guy ships cars that drive themselves, humanoid robots for the factory floor, brain chips that let paralysed people move a cursor with pure thought, and an AI running on a supercomputer his team stood up in months instead of years.
Your are debating people who sincerely believe that money is the economy and is not just a transaction mechanism lying on top of the actual goods and services that make up an economy. That the physical vectors of goods/services/logistics are just formalities relative to hard currency distribution, which, when implemented, would “solve world hunger” with $50 billion or whatever bunk number they claim is enough.
Your are dealing with envious, deeply incurious people who, as history has demonstrated again and again, will kill millions in pursuit of their ideology. There is no convincing them, debating them, enlightening them. It is futile.
Tesla's sales are down year over year and yet it's somehow trading at a 360x multiple to earnings.
SpaceX has a really cool launch and satellite comms business saddled with multiple money-losing other businesses and is currently running at a loss despite the revolutionary aerospace part being profitable.
There's pre-2020 Elon who did cool technical stuff and then there's post-covid Elon who spent $50B on Twitter and then cut it's revenue by 66% so that he could post more cringe memes.
The sad part, relevant to TFA above, is that all of the financial chicanery turns out to have been vastly more profitable than inventing re-usable rockets or shipping the first viable electric car. That's not me being a jealous hater, that's me being mournful about what's rewarded.
I don't own shares in any Musk company, and agree that Tesla as a car company is grossly overvalued. But as the parent states, dude gets shit done.
It is _hard_ to start a successful car company, let alone one on an untested platform. He did it, and it taught China how to build the future of cars.
It is _impossible_ to build a successful rocket company from nothing. He did it, and SpaceX is now ~60% of _worldwide_ launches.
He's had plenty of failures, but Musk is what people are buying. He's gross and annoying, but I wouldn't count him out, and I'm rooting for his success.
The rocket company is probably more technically impressive anyway but I am disinclined to accept the attempts to rewrite Tesla's history. Maybe it was necessary to force the actual people who started the company out for it to survive and a Series A is certainly important, but Musk is still an investor in the car company and not the person who started it.
I guess I'm rooting for his success too, my point was that the actual product successes as I see them all happened pre-2020. Covid era broke some people and Musk seems to be one of them.
If he were still mission focused, he would have used his time in the Trump administration on cool missions instead of "ctrl-f trans" and defund random projects with "transducer" or "transfusion" in them.
Take a close look at what you are complaining about:
- Tesla ain't that successful
- SpaceX isn't even profitable
- Hes tweeting stuff I don't like
- I was rooting for him when "was keeping it real", but "now that financial chicanery is rewarded I can't in good conscience" etc
People love the underdog and love the looser, they hate successful people because of what it tells them about themselves.
That's some fantastic armchair psychiatry but I don't think you got where I'm coming from.
I specifically called out a bunch of compliments and things I liked prior to 2020, and I think we'd both agree that "spending all day on twitter" is not great regardless of tweet content.
What exactly happened in 2020 that changed your mind. Perhaps I'm missing something?
Thanks for the good faith question.
In my opinion, around that time he stopped being interested in tech and manufacturing of said tech as his top concerns (WHICH HE WAS GOOD AT), and started being more concerned with twitter culture war bullshit. This happened to a lot of people on both sides of the aisle around that time due to the lockdowns, but the lockdowns are well behind us and he's still not focused around "get to mars" or "redefine human energy usage" as his top goals IMO. He's buying twitter, doing what he did at DOGE and repackaging a failed AI company into an IPO on SpaceX's coattails. The stories out of the SpaceX launch business are all about how they effectively "manage up" to get him out of the way and on with their jobs.
So if I may rephrase, the issue is that he kind of lost his way as a pure-hearted engineer working for the progress of technology and the good of mankind and started to stray of path with his half-baked political exploits. He is no longer focused on the mission.
I understand the sentiment, and getting as involved into politics as he did was probably a mistake, simply because he is not good at it.
If I may offer a different perspective as to the on-mission part: he realised some years ago that leftism was a grave danger to his plan to make mankind multi-planetary, so he decided he had to get involved, if he wanted to or not. You will probably not agree with this point of view, but perhaps it will help soften the image of him in your own mind.
> that leftism was a grave danger to his plan to make mankind multi-planetary
Yeah, that's just saying "social media addiction" in more words. Also, Star Trek?
I think their statement is useful to contextualise what people consider leftism though. Looking at Musk's actual political actions, it seems like leftism (or at least the part that directly affects him and his companies) is when regulators are allowed to ask Musk to stop doing securities fraud with his social media addiction, and it's not entirely unreasonable for him to consider such enforcement a threat (though maybe not "a grave danger") in case it escalates beyond strongly worded letters. I am, by that metric, a leftist. Possibly a radical far-left communist, even.