Has Musk actually done anything other than release an overpriced electric car?

He keeps on coming up with crazy ideas that make the news but nothing ever comes of them.

It comes out of the car business, and Panasonic makes the batteries, but Tesla is doing energy storage.

SpaceX has been innovative.

2016 birth of a nation made me and my wife stream tears in the theater. never been more ashamed of white people in my life than walking out of that showing

i actually thought spike did an excellent job of balancing the seriousness and the comedy aspect of BKKK, to where it could make you emotional but not so much so that it would be a poor choice for a date or something.

tbh i think both movies should be manadatory-watch for all of amerikkka

Preordered CTH's book.

Not sure if it'll be satirical or legit. Maybe a mix of both.

I bought it too, based on the previews I think it's apt to be a slightly better version of that Daily Show book from back when the Daily Show was watchable. The drawings I've seen are legitimately funny, Eli Valley seems good.

I mean, building a production car company from the ground up, especially with a semi-novel propulsion mechanism, is a stunning business accomplishment, even if you don't care for the car, but also:

1. He was one of the founders of Paypal
2. He started a multi-billion dollar solar installation company, which was ultimately rolled into Tesla
3. He started another company that built the first-ever privately developed orbital rocket, built another such rocket that incorporates unique reusability features (it lands on its tail like an old scifi movie!) and will also likely be the first-ever commercial vehicle to fly manned, and built a third rocket that is the most powerful rocket currently in operation by many measures.

And he's bangin' Grimes!

just like trump

Paypal. I think you have to give him partial credit for SpaceX even though it's clear that the bulk of the credit should go to Gwynne Shotwell. But the various Tesla fiascos pretty much wipe out whatever credibility he's built up over the years.

sorry elon, you have been assigned only PARTIAL CREDIT for Space X. See Trolly McTrollson in his office hours, thx.

Like when someone says elon musk Did Innovation with spaceX they aren't saying that he like designed and built all the rockets. SpaceX has thousands of employees! Of course many other people deserve credit for the innovative stuff it has accomplished.

Yeah I feel like the Elon Musk criticism has gone pretty over the top, kind of as a backlash to the hero-worship approach to him in past years. Obviously there have been some embarrassing episodes with the Twitter fights and child submarine etc. He doesn't either have to be a visionary genius or a useless piece of ****. I think he genuinely tries to innovate and create breakthroughs and should be applauded for that. If Tesla ultimately goes tits-up, who cares? It's not my money.

Which of the mega-rich are to be preferred? Complete piece of **** Steve Jobs? Bill Gates, who was basically in the right place at the right time and built a company which creates mediocre products which make a lot of money for structural reasons? Jeff Bezos? Peter Thiel? I think the world needs guys like Musk. Even if some of his schemes are hare-brained or sometimes downright idiotic, you need guys who are prepared to push the limits and maybe risk looking like an idiot sometimes.

I mean you don't have to prefer any multi-billionaires. It's not like you have to root for any of these dudes.

Having said that, I'm interested in Musk because he's involved in businesses that I think are very important to the future. You can be suspicious about the purity of motives of someone worth tens of billions of dollars (you should be!) while hoping for the success of SpaceX. Musk is right that dramatically lowering the cost of space transport could be a huge game changer for humankind. So hoping for success in that business seems fine without buying into like actually rooting for Musk personally.

https://twitter.com/TrisResists/stat...96160863608835

resistancehole

All Musk has to do to repair his public image is STFU for 8-12 months. He's brought all of this negative publicity on himself by being a petulant attention whore.

Saying Microsoft makes billions of dollars purely for "structural reasons" seems absurd.

I think this misunderstands the way business works. The whole job of an entrepreneur/tech company founder is to hire great people and give them the resources to work on important problems. The fact that Musk hired Shotwell or Mueller and a bunch of other brilliant engineers and got them working on SpaceX is an explanation of why he did a great job founding SpaceX and deserves a ton of credit. I think the better view is that he deserves only partial credit for Tesla because he failed to find a good leader for the business side of that company, so he ended up doing a lot of that stuff himself, which has given his various personality flaws a great opportunity to screw things up.

In IT, software infrastructure becomes entrenched and it becomes very expensive to change it. Companies can make money from rent-seeking, basically just exploiting this. The poster child for this is Oracle, who are a notoriously useless company who make mountains of money based off the fact that people cannot afford to stop using their products, even though there are better versions of those products that are free. In the case of Microsoft, Gates happened to write the operating system for the x86 IBM PC architecture which became wildly popular for reasons having nothing to do with his software (it was because the architecture was non-proprietary, unlike say Apple, so that third party companies could make their own versions of "IBM PCs") and the success of Microsoft just snowballed from that.

It's like the English language. There is nothing super amazing about English compared to other languages. It's the default world language from a series of historical happenstances and now it's so entrenched that it can't be changed, even if there are better alternatives.

"various personality flaws" is a new hilarious euphemism for "actionable stock fraud via tweet."

He was there, but you're giving him too much credit by saying he started SolarCity. The founders are his cousins though.

And it rolled into Tesla because it was a huge money loser that tried and failed to buy enough market share to control the industry.

Technically, the euphemism I used for the securities law violations is “screw things up.” Which is not very original.

Here's something to think about wrt Microsoft: When was the last time they launched a successful new product? Know anyone who uses Windows Phone? Anyone for whom Cortana is their favourite assistant? Do you browse using Edge? Did you even know that Internet Explorer is called Edge now?

The Surface range has been mildly successful, but that's it. Other than that they just rent-seek existing products.

I don't even know quite how to describe what she's doing, but I'm nonetheless amused that she's doing it to own the libs.