Musk likes to take credit for things he at most participated in.
Electric cars where already gaining traction by the time Tesla got their production in order, so if he had an impact there, its only in marketing a product you could only buy from other companies. The charger network maybe? But wasn't most of that heavily subsidized?
SpaceX's success is massively overstated, every time it's brought up. Their rockets are still not stable and if you actually tally up all the money they've received from the state, it'd be way more expensive - even adjusted to inflation - then the space shuttle launches from the nineties.
What other impact are you thinking of? The hyper loop? The solar rooftop's? His vaporware robots? The boring company? Everything turned out to be pure hype with hilariously overstated success. Or maybe the autopilot which is still only usable by people that enjoy gambling with pedestrian lives?
>Electric cars where already gaining traction by the time Tesla got their production in order, so if he had an impact there, its only in marketing a product you could only buy from other companies
I'm as cynical about Tesla as anyone, as my comment history will show. I think they played fast and loose with financial data when celebrity and anything tech put you above the rules. If he had the enemies he has now, I don't think they would have made it.
But...Elon Musk is a force. I was skeptical of him in, maybe, 2016, but the guy has managed to continue to do stuff no one else seems capable of, even in the face of haters. There's no way pre-Elon Tesla does what he did, I don't believe it for a second.
Even Twitter; yes he fired too many people and it's a bit of a fiasco (and hard to kill, apparently). But the fact that he's using it to explicitly push an agenda is wild. There's no one else like him.
What tomoyoirl said is correct. Musk's talent is mainly in raising hype which results in incredible funding. he's definitely the most successful person at that since Steve Jobs.
Everyone that ever worked in large enterprise knew that Twitter would be fine after the mass terminations. The only thing you lose at that point is the ability to maneuver, the platform will be mostly automated and barring incompetence or malice, things will just keep chugging along with a skeleton crew.
> Electric cars where already gaining traction by the time Tesla got their production in order, so if he had an impact there, its only in marketing a product you could only buy from other companies. The charger network maybe? But wasn't most of that heavily subsidized?
Given how shit even current EVs are compared to the early Model S, you are totally wrong. It was always at most a side project for ALL the existing OEMs as we now know. They have have had chance after chance after chance to prove the thesis that "if they cared, they could produce a Tesla killer overnight". None of the OEMs have produced anything that is competitive with Tesla in all metrics (price, range, features etc.) all of them compromise in one or more areas.
The only real serious competitors are the Chinese. There is a reason when teardown analysis reports are offered on all the EVs, the Chinese care about one company and one company only: Tesla. Everyone else is just a follower and the Chinese are not even bothering to waste their time looking at them. You even see it in their actions. Tesla is the only "legacy western" company without a JV partner in China. China can happily dump all the other losers any time they want. They can't afford to lose Tesla so they have accommodated them.
>SpaceX's success is massively overstated, every time it's brought up. Their rockets are still not stable and if you actually tally up all the money they've received from the state, it'd be way more expensive - even adjusted to inflation - then the space shuttle launches from the nineties.
Are you for real? In 2021 they launched ~380 Metric tons of mass to orbit while the rest of the world combined launched about 400 metric tons. In 2022? They were double what the rest of the world did and finally in 2023, they were 80% of all the mass to orbit launched. When I mean rest of world that includes: Rest of the US industry + Europe + India + China + Japan + Russia + everyone else. If you look at the other launch providers in the US they get far more subsidies and have delivered not even a fraction of what SpaceX has provided.
Can you think of many industries where a single company is doing 80% of worldwide effort? And they are on track to increase that by 50% this year (a metric they will likely achieve given their track record).
In the last couple years they have sent 42 humans to orbit and back. They year they are on track to do their first spacewalk.
Starlink now has 2.3 Million customers in over 70 countries.
I am seeing this outright dismissal of Musk more and more since the whole Twitter saga. Its reeks of ignorance just like all the people that repeatedly make fun of Apple users as idiots who just get duped by fancy marketing. Even in 2024 people here make that silly argument. Musk bashing is the new version of that. It just makes you look ignorant because you are so blinded by what you don't like that you have dismissed all these amazing achievements that no one else is doing.
I think you're interpreting something into my comments I didn't say.
My point is that every product was hilariously under delivered, not that the product itself is unusable.
Let's address the products you're citing:
The Tesla model s was marketed heavily on price and the full self driving.
There were essentially no electric cars in the 100k price range the Tesla cost, so comparing the cars at the time the car was announced with when the car actually was delivered, 5 yrs later is extremely questionable.
But without Musk's hype, we probably wouldn't have the rivian etc, as they were all riding his hype wave. But we'd still have electric cars. Just less then we've got right now.
Now SpaceX's.
It got billions of taxpayers money, there can be no second company because nobody else can get such funding.
In the nineties pretty much everything was delivered by NASA. It just threw in the towel for price reasons, so Musk came along and promised a lunar base & manned missions to mars, netting him all contacts.
So yes, now we have SpaceX. The only player that can deliver things to orbit, because Russia is too poor, European nations somehow don't want to spend money on it and China is mostly interested for military applications, so they're not publishing what they're actually delivering to orbit. They're definitely shipping things however, you occasionally get leaked videos from failed launches that spread toxic fumes close to population centers and similar fuckups.
What you're using as an argument is really an inevitability.
Starlink is another highly exaggerated product, which is still decent value if you need/want an Internet connection in an area that doesnt have usable cable connections. It's not the cheapest, nor the most expensive. It's in the middle. It's a solid choice (and so are the Tesla), it just didn't have quite as much impact as people attribute to it.
I'm not even bashing Musk. What I said from the start is that his contributions are exaggerated.
>SpaceX employees take the Musk fundraising and spend it well. They have systems in place to minimize his technical interference.
Sounds like nonsense used to wave away his success with SpaceX.
If you look at his interviews, it seems like he is most involved in SpaceX of all his ventures. He can explain deep technical details of the product whereas this is less true for Tesla and has been proven many times that he cannot do the same for Twitter.
Musk’s true talent is hype, fundraising, and getting buy-in from a crowd of people who Want To Believe. He does an incredible job of this, attracting capital investment on absurdly favorable terms.
(Delivery on his wild promises, well, sometimes the true believers he hires make that happen, sometimes not.)
> Musk’s true talent is hype, fundraising, and getting buy-in from a crowd of people who Want To Believe.
I wonder how long this lasts, though? The more we see of him, the less smart/magical he seems other than to devotees. I feel like his getting in the limelight has pulled the curtain back quite a bit.
Exactly. Musk makes a passable "hype man" that would do great on a sales pitch. But it's the same story as every sales team where he promises so much that isn't feasible to deliver on the timelines he promises.
SpaceX's success is massively overstated, every time it's brought up. Their rockets are still not stable and if you actually tally up all the money they've received from the state, it'd be way more expensive - even adjusted to inflation - then the space shuttle launches from the nineties.
What other impact are you thinking of? The hyper loop? The solar rooftop's? His vaporware robots? The boring company? Everything turned out to be pure hype with hilariously overstated success. Or maybe the autopilot which is still only usable by people that enjoy gambling with pedestrian lives?