Most of them don’t, go to a local pub some time. Some people misunderstand that companies use puffery like “The Best” specifically because it doesn’t mean anything. But you will rarely find someone make material statements that aren’t true, if an advert mentions the EPA rated gas’s mileage it’s going to be close.
Musk on the other hand has this odd issue of trying to overstate his accomplishments such as calling himself a founder of Tesla for some bizarre reason. I don’t know if imposter syndrome or what, but it’s been very detrimental for stockholders when he had Tesla rescue Solar City rather than letting it fail etc.
Making material statements about self driving was just dumb from a legal perspective compared to puffery, but hey it sold some cars and he’s not in prison so ehh it worked out.
Not the founder? maybe read Walter Isaacson's book.
Stock graph shows Tesla stock had no material impact from the Solar City purchase, 90% of it's value coming after 2020. Today, Tesla energy and solar dominates the industry to the point where every installer offers Tesla Solar including the largest US installer Sunrun.
> Not the founder? maybe read Walter Isaacson's book.
The company was founded in July 1 2003, Musk didn’t even hear about the company until 2004. That’s a rather large gap to call someone a founder. But hey it’s an arbitrary distinction so feel free to disagree.
> Stock graph shows Tesla had no material impact from the Solar City Purchase
From the announcement of the purchase to its completion Tesla’s stock dropped ~20%.
Buying or creating a solar company in house made sense, over paying to bail out a relatives solar company he was involved with didn’t. Solar City was in 1.5 Billion dollars in debt, their business model was failing, and they had just laid off 20% of their workforce so yea Tesla shareholders got hosed.
Tesla was nothing but two guys, a name, an office, and an idea when Musk invested $6.5 million into it. They had no technology, no car, no money, no nothing. That makes Musk a founder.
No, that makes Musk one of two series A investors.
> two guys, a name, an office, and an idea
Add in the paperwork they filled out and we call those things companies. The entire point of incubators like Ycombinator is getting companies to a point where someone would make a significant investment, Martin Eberhard, Marc Tarpenning and Ian Wright who joined a few months later pulled that first major hurdle off on their own.
If Musk had walked away they would’ve just kept looking because it was a very compelling investment as made clear by finding funding within a month of looking and the 1 million put up from a 3rd party.
How Musk approaches marketing is directly relevant here in terms of Tesla and SpaceX.
He also materially over promised Starlink’s bandwidth for zero gain and meaningful legal risk. It’s a consistent pattern and worth remembering for both customers and investors. In 2020: “The speeds are still not as fast as what SpaceX originally claimed for the constellation, but they are slightly faster than what early user testing has shown.” https://www.theverge.com/2020/9/3/21419841/spacex-starlink-i... and in 2024 it’s still not there even if it’s a useful product anyway.
Really? Show me which marketing actually overpromises and doesn't tell you that it's a beta system, where you have actually sit, pay attention to the road and take over if needed.
How about the main feature on tesla.com/autopilot, a (faked) video still there from many years ago that starts with the text that the driver is there only for legal reasons?
Or cynically pump & dumping Dogecoin, or the Cybertruck rollout, or the cave rescue sub, or buying and maintaining Twitter, or not calling decent people pedophiles because he felt slighted.
Or pretending he had bigger parts in the development of companies which he actually bought after the work was done. Or selectively withdrawing Starlink access to entire regions on his own whims at critical moments. Or creating a special system to promote his own tweets above everyone elses.
Or covering up heinous and illegal animal abuse for Neuralink. Or setting us up for an ablation cascade. Or not paying rent in his offices. Or lying about his father's emerald mines in apartheid South Africa.
... I'm just saying - the anti-fraud he fuckin ain't.
Animal abuse?? Pray tell what happened
Emerald mines? I thought that was debunked
Starlink - I think he managed it extremely well.. and now there will be StarShield that our government controls
Pretended - if it was all pretending, he wouldn’t be doing it over and over and over again.. he has made an incredible impact with these companies
Elon musk admitted his father owned a share in an apartheid emerald mine in a 2014 interview, an interview which has since been deleted without comment [1]. Kinda makes all the later denials look... Well, fraudulent.
"I thought that was debunked Starlink" - What? You gotta finish your sentences if you want to call people deranged bruh.
Kessler syndrome hasn't been debunked - ask Scientific American, or NASA. And he certainly did cut access to it during multiple crises, there's no shortage of sources for that.
> he has made an incredible impact with these companies
Certainly - but a lot of it is only spun to be positive and is in fact profoundly negative, if you think about it. Electric cars are not the way out of the energy crisis, public transportation is - which Musk has seemingly deliberately held back [2]. And the corporate takeover of space has been a dystopian sci-fi theme for a very, very long time.
> "Musk admitted to his biographer Ashlee Vance that Hyperloop was all about trying to get legislators to cancel plans for high-speed rail in California—even though he had no plans to build it."
Lots of people get taken in by fraudsters. And you know what they do when the fraud is uncovered? Most often, they double down protecting the fraudster, often even lashing out at the messenger. Because admitting you got got is very hard on the ego. I believe in you electriclove - break your bubble.
His father having "a share in an emerald mine" doesn't mean Elon used his father's money for his business ventures, and it doesn't mean the share was substantial.
The idea that Musk has single-handedly held back public transportation is funny. Musk has zero control over the California government that has failed multiple times in building high speed rail.
> His father having "a share in an emerald mine" doesn't mean Elon used his father's money for his business ventures, and it doesn't mean the share was substantial.
It doesn't, no. But it does mean that when he later claimed not to have anything to do with an emerald mine in apartheid SA, he was being knowingly fraudulent. And it takes no small effort to get articles taken down. If it weren't for the Internet Archive, there'd be no evidence he's lying when he says so.
In his own words [from 1 above, already linked]:
> This is going to sound slightly crazy, but my father also had a share in an Emerald mine in Zambia. I was 15 and really wanted to go with him but didn’t realize how dangerous it was. I couldn’t find my passport so I ended up grabbing my brother’s – which turned out to be six months overdue! So we had this planeload of contraband and an overdue passport from another person. There were AK-47s all over the place and I’m thinking, “Man, this could really go bad.”
Does that sound like something someone with an insubstantial share would do with their 15 year old? It's possible, I guess, and if you want to give him the benefit of the doubt on that you're welcome to. Seems naive though.
And the point wasn't that it got him his start, although it certainly didn't hurt. That's a strawman. The point was that Musk has denied having any part in an emerald mine since that interview to build his myth as an entirely self-made entrepreneur. Fraudulently.
> The idea that Musk has single-handedly held back public transportation is funny.
It sure is. Many people have had a part in driving America's infrastructure further into shambles, as they like things just as they are. Especially car makers. So hilarious.
However, if you read carefully over the thread so far, you'll see that no one actually made the claim that he "single-handedly" is responsible. Although, Musk himself seems happy to have had a part in it:
> As I’ve written in my book, Musk admitted to his biographer Ashlee Vance that Hyperloop was all about trying to get legislators to cancel plans for high-speed rail in California—even though he had no plans to build it.
I love it when headlines
distill complex decisions and/or power dynamics that happen within organizational structures down to a level tiktokers will understand, and then they run with that and assume they know better than the person who built the entire company. Or three. Pat yourself on the back.
