Musk is certainly a fraud. He has zero technological breakthroughs, and cool inventions of his own. Some physics Msc. dropout because he apparently doesn’t have enough IQ. He just hired some engineers way smarter than himself, and is good at being a PR clown.
He claimed among other things:
- AI is the devil, it will kill us all.
- We live in a simulation. (Some idiots watched The Matrix.)
- Nanotechnology is bullshit.
- Tesla self driving is better than human (it killed people, made a lot of accidents that shouldn’t have happened).
- Re-usable rockets are a great innovation in space (no just wasting funds and holding back progress) EDIT: I think this is only half true, it did achieve great cost savings in the launch market, and achieved market domination, but it is by no means a significant breakthrough in space, at least it looks like it wasn’t his invention, looks like he just hired engineers that made a scrapped NASA project. He seems like just a mediocre programmer with no understanding of advanced engineering in any field.
My verdict is that Musk is a typical American fraudster, like a lot of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs.
He is however great at raising funds, selling visions, and paying engineers to build cool stuff. That doesn’t mean the image his PR machine projects is entirely factual, though.
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Tesla/space x are the quintessential American frauds. This means they are not based on outright lies but on gross exaggerations and wishful thinking backed by great PR and propaganda. Many previous American frauds like invasion of Iraq and the exaggeration of American military capability to trump business are based on this layout.
Musk is basically a welfare king. Now, there is nothing wrong with that and most breakthroughs have happened through government backing. But musk is a private man and often implies that he is spending money through his own pocket which he obviously is not. Also, he has not actually put forward any tech breakthrough till now and is famous only for promising things which have not been done.
To put this in perspective, bill gates raked in the moolah only after he developed windows not in anticipation that he will revolutionize PC industry. Same with Google guys and Steve Jobs, in every case the innovators first made a breakthrough and then cashed in on it. But musk has done nothing other than make hd streams of rocket landings.
The tech of rocket is basically the same as developed by Russians in the 70s(without supercomputers). There is no, I repeat no breakthrough since then. But more disturbingly, space x is promising that a rocket can be used multiple times (like a commercial airline) to bring down the cost and make it like a passenger airline. The only problem is that it cannot be done(with current tech as musk has made no breakthrough). It is a well known fact that making a new rocket/shuttle is far more economical than reusing the same as the cost of failure is too high. As space x came to know some time back(Rocket explodes on launch pad in blow to Elon Musk's SpaceX). It is far safer to build a new shuttle than even take a small risk of failure as the loss would be too high(which increases significantly if there are passengers). So to conclude space x is a scam company being kept afloat through govt subsidy which would not be so bad if it did not divert resources from people/researchers who have a non zero chance of breakthrough.
Coming to Tesla, how do you rationalize a company that sells(or gives away) a few thousand cars a year being valued more than a company that sells millions of units. Ans: make discussion about it taboo and stick to the dogma that Tesla is an innovator and skeptics are just jealous or fools. But let us look at the electric car market. Making electric cars and setting up battery stations like petrol pumps is in no way a revolutionary idea(it is also not eco friendly, where do you think electricity comes from, hint: mostly fossil fuels). True breakthrough will have to be in battery technology that radically increases storage capacity , if you get batteries that can store energy 50–500 times the current capacity then that is a real breakthrough and the person who does it surely deserves to be a billionaire. Car design and sleek looks are not important/secondary, the real breakthrough has to come in battery storage so that a car can go 2000 km without the need to recharge(which will be eco friendly). However musk does not even talk about this and spends all his time making pretty designs with the same shitty batteries that last as long as a smartphone. Tesla's problems are not that it can never be profitable, profitability should not be the concern as most great ventures started without profit motive(space race, mobile, internet etc.) It is that musk has become a billionaire without making a breakthrough which every single tech billionaire did before(bill gates, Steve Jobs, Google guys, Zuckerberg- all made the breakthrough first and then cashed in). Musk also has diverted the attention and govt funding from anonymous researchers who have a non zero chance of making an energy storage breakthrough.
So in conclusion, musk is a typical American fraud and a braggart who sucks at exactly what he claims to be great at. To think of it he is the Green(and liked) version of Donald Trump.
EDIT: to further reinforce the point of shitty batteries being the biggest hurdle, here is article that mentions that the longest trip taken on an electric bike required charging every 150 km. This is pathetic compared to combustion engine, then there is also the problem of battery discharge which is a non issue in gasoline engine.
You can rest assured that the condition of electric cars is far worse.
Whenever I see this “old idea” crap for Tesla I always remember an old episode of the Ali G - Hoverboard show with Sacha Baron Cohen where he pitches a hoverboard idea to a Venture Capitalist. It went like this:
Ali G - What's this? (holding a wheeless skateboard)
Investor - That is a skateboard. No, it is a toothbrush. Okay, what is it?
Ali G - Grow a brain. What is it? Well, I'll tell you what it is. It's a hoverboard.
Investor - I don't understand what you mean.
Ali G - It's a hoverboard. Is you seen "Back to the Future"?
Investor - Yeah.
Ali G - Has you seen the bit where they jump on the board and it flies around?
Investor - Yeah.
Ali G - It's in the future.
Investor - Yeah.
Ali G - That film must have been about 10 years ago. No one has even thought about makin' that thing.
Investor - Mm-hmm. But it doesn't do that.
Ali G - It doesn't do it yet. That's where you lot come in. You come up with the science.
Investor - We don't do that. This is nothing. It was it's a film. It's a story.
Ali G - Well, they musta used the board from somewhere. They made one of them that worked.
Investor - No, no, no.
Ali G - So, how did he jump onit and fly all around- and do all the chases, then?
Investor - It's called special effects. How do they do anything in a movie? Good luck.
It may have been the funniest episode of that show ever. The awkward silence between him showing the board and the guy trying to figure out what was that was probably where Sacha fought the hardest to keep in character. And Trump was in it!
I have heard of these same accusations.
I would say it is always good to question anything you hear and just don’t take it as truth until you feel comfortable with the presented facts.
We should always question a public figure who receives Government subsidies and funds because it is money that has came from the public. Elon Musk's growing empire is fueled by $4.9 billion in government subsidies
