> Musk is also hoping for scientific breakthrough. When the breakthrough is not there, he says it will be there in 2 years.
Yes, a lot of what he says is nonsense, like Holmes. But the difference is he also delivered big time on some of what he said. I assume many people are aware of his pie in the sky hopes for the future, but that is different from Holmes claiming she already had a technological breakthrough and succeeded in something all the other scientists with decades more experience knew wasn’t possible, and yet not providing any evidence.
Any examples of the big time deliveries? Except the stock prices and cryptocoins? I think his first big time delivery of something revolutionary is about to be StarLink.
Musk's biggest achievement is changing the Conventional Wisdom[1] of government policymakers in the west from "electric vehicles are a nice idea, but a toy for rich people" to "right, we're phasing out fossil fuel powered cars" in the space of a decade.
That is something I did not expect to see in my lifetime.
You will quibble that lots of other people did the technical work. But Musk had the public visibility.
That's a pretty wild statement, even if it was about Tesla instead of Musk.
Especially considering that a ton of these policies are about as old as the Tesla roadster. Must be a hell of a achievement to change policy retroactively.
The reason why we have an electronic car revolution now is because batteries have finally become cheap and dense enough. Maybe the largest manufacturer of EVs deserves some credit, but that's of course never been Tesla.
I don't know what newspapers you read. Even the Model S was wildly successfull by 2017. I certainly read about that car topping sales charts in Norway thanks to government subsidies in 2013 or so.
There were government subsidies for EV cars more than 18 years ago, and they were almost everywhere 18 months ago. Anyway, what newspapers report and what's the "conventional wisdom of policymakers in the west" is unrelated, if we even accept that "the west" and "conventional wisdom of policymakers" aren't nebulous constructs.
I was talking about announcements of government policies in various European countries to prohibit or tightly limit sales of new fossil fueled vehicles by 2030 or 2035 or similar year, not about current annual sales of vehicles.
As I said, the conventional wisdom changed from "electric vehicles are not practical" to " we must have only electric vehicles" in the space of a decade in which Tesla showed that EVs could be as practical as fossil fuel vehicles.[1] Other manufacturers (VW, Toyota, Hyundai-Kia, etc., are now scrambling to catch up.
1. Yes, the Nissan Leaf was there too, and a few others, but it/they suffered from short range and/or other compromises, so the "impractical" label remained in the minds of policymakers. And it/they suffered from undermarketing, because the makers didn't want to cannibalise their ICE vehicle sales.
I see a lot more driving Toyota Corollas. Making a car is not a new thing, even electric cars are nothing new.
And as for Space X, space travel is also nothing new. We have been traveling to space since 60 years and vertical landing and reusable space vehicles had been done before.
All these stuff is simply re-do of the stuff humans did in the past but failed commercially. As I said, Musk is brilliant in building commercial systems. This time we have better cheaper technology and these things can actually be feasible.
How are Corollas relevant to this discussion? If you think scaling up a car manufacturer to becoming a mainstream brand is not “delivering big time”, then I guess I will simply have to disagree.
> All these stuff is simply re-do of the stuff humans did in the past but failed commercially.
That was my point. At least some of Musks’s claims were based in reality and so he was able to deliver something. The entirety of Holmes’ claims were fictional. That’s the difference.
Becoming a mainstream brand is definitely not a big delivery on the promise that in 2 years you will tell your electric car where you want to go and it will take you there without further input from you.
As a financial delivery, sure. It turned out to be a good stock investment. So may others like AMD, Apple or GameStop. I don't argue that Musk can't make brands and money, he surely can.
You're running some very weird arguments here. Bringing costs down and volumes up are significant achievements in any industry.
Sure there were a few other electric cars out there before Tesla but nothing with 500km range that was compelling and affordable to the middle classes. There were other rockets too but SpaceX significantly reduced cost and launch frequency. Nobody had recovered an orbital rocket before SpaceX, let alone reusing it another 7 times.
I don't think that I argued against any of that, I don't know what do you expect me to say but I have to point out that the pace shuttles were re-used much more than 7 times. I'm sure that SpaceX will surpass these numbers some day, after all it's a work in progress as long as you don't accept that you failed. Space X is doing some cool stuff and spectacular videos.
The orbiters and solid boosters were but the massive external tank was not recovered. The time and complexity associated with the refurbishment of the orbiters and booters resulted in a program cost of over $1b per launch. SpaceX can launch similar sized payloads on FH for ~$150m.
Yes, a lot of what he says is nonsense, like Holmes. But the difference is he also delivered big time on some of what he said. I assume many people are aware of his pie in the sky hopes for the future, but that is different from Holmes claiming she already had a technological breakthrough and succeeded in something all the other scientists with decades more experience knew wasn’t possible, and yet not providing any evidence.