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I originally bought Tesla shares back in 2018 because Elon Musk was making a lot of sense and traditional car makers seemed blind to the obvious transition away from oil. I was also optimistic about their AI vision and the fact he got Andrej Karpathy to join made me very optimistic.
But lately, Elon Musk seems to be an idiot. It’s not about approving/disproving. The dude just lost his mind and that won’t be good for the company.
Karpathy also left. You don’t leave the company with the most cameras on the road if your whole schtick is computer vision and AI.
To be fair, he might just be hopping on the generative AI bandwagon.
But I’m sure that if Elon still had a sound mind, he would have found a way to keep Karpathy in the Tesla fold.
Fuck it, I’ll go one step further. Elon Musk used to be an OpenAI board member alongside Sam Altman. In 2022, Elon Musk was the richest man in the world. Unless he is an idiot and treated Sam Altman badly, I am sure Sam Altman must have chatted with him in 2022 (or earlier) to tell about how awesome ChatGPT was going to be. Like, if your former colleague is the richest man in the world, you give that guy a call, right?
So how the hell did he spend $40B on fucking Twitter when Microsoft bought OpenAI for $10B?
How did he not end up owning a significant chunk of OpenAI?
I seriously think he lost his mind.
Disapproval is the wrong word. It’s a loss of trust in his ability to execute.
I more or less agree. I could not have done a bigger 180 on this guy. He was my hope for a better future and now he’s one of the biggest reasons for the world becoming a much worse place IMO.
It legit bums me out.
I honestly think the money made him lose his mind.
It’s probably going to be necessary for the mental well-being of billionaires that the public limits how much money they can have.
And it’s not just Musk. Also Epstein, Prince Andrew, Trump, Bezos, Zuckerberg. It seems smart and capable people are literally losing their minds when they get too rich and powerful.
Steve Jobs is an interesting case. His mental health was obviously deteriorating and got him kicked out of Apple. That led to an improvement which led to Pixar and the iMac, iPhone and iPhone. Then he lost his mind again.
Musk also got into SpaceX and Tesla after getting kicked out of PayPal.
US presidents are only allowed two terms. Maybe there should be a rule that after 10 years of being a billionaire, you get reduced to 500 million.
These guys need a challenge to excel. A mountain to conquer. Once they achieve the top, their brains rot faster than a banana.
We should probably pick them up at the top and put them back at the base of the next mountain to climb.
Just thinking out loud.
He was never not an arse though. A walking talking arse. I still don’t get how he’s conned anyone into buying what he’s selling.
It’s because to most people he appears to know what he is talking about. Once he gets into a field one knows something about, it’s clear he is just bullshitting constantly.
I totally agree with most of the criticism, but when he talks about rockets he knows what he’s talking about. Not sure about the rest tho.
Nah.
He tried to convince the world that his last exploded rocket was an outstanding success.
But we look at the damaged launchpad and now the delayed Moon project because of the explosion and we who know better understand that he is also an idiot with rockets.
Do you really think SpaceX is on schedule to deliver a Moon Lander or launch vehicle by 2025?
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-59231632
Elon Musk is a master of marketing. It will do you well to understand what mental-trick he played here. When Elon Musk spends a $Billion failing at a hard problem, he looks like a genius even though everything fails.
But when Elon Musk fails at a task that everyone thinks is an “easy” or “solved” problem IE: Hey Elon / SpaceX, are you actually going to deliver on NASA’s contract in 2024? Oh wait, you aren’t, lets delay the “Return to the Moon” project to 2025. Oohhhh wait, you’re rocket is still exploding on the launchpad? We’re going to have to delay longer… aren’t we?
Now we see he’s an idiot. Because SpaceX/Elon has made the mistake of accepting a real world job with real world schedules and consequences. You can’t just fail like an idiot on a task everyone knows is doable (IE: return to the moon project).
So what’s the lesson? Spend other people’s money (Lol, Elon is spending SpaceX’s money, not his own $Billion) on failures to look busy. Even if you know it won’t work, pretend your failures are successes, and people will believe you if they think its a hard enough problem. (Ex: rocket explodes, declare a success even if it delays other projects. Distract people from the slipping schedule).
SpaceX brought us rockets that can land.
Tesla brought EV’s to the mainstream when all the other car makers were only producing compliancy cars.
Maybe he was always an arse, but back in 2018, he really did seem to me like the closest thing to a Steve Jobs 2.0 in Silicon Valley.
I bought Tesla stock, and I have sold it all, and made quite a nice buck. No regrets on my side.
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The theory going around is that when his daughter came out as Trans … Elon took a hard right, anti-LGBTQ stance.
Dunno how legit that rumor is, but the timing seems to fit.
I mean it’s chicken and egg, right? If Elon was going right wing privately at home… that would only cause one of his kids to come out as Trans.
I kind of take issue with the idea that any of the people you listed are overly smart. Bezos, the guy’s a monster but I do think he was a visionary. But mostly they won the lottery with a lucky idea, either their own or someone else’s that they stole. Elon is proof of that with the whole Twitter debacle, and so is Zuckerberg with Meta. They have their handlers to keep them on track. Any time they try to go off and be maverick innovators again they fall flat on their faces. Why? Because, again, the truth is that they just got very lucky the first time. Then they get surrounded by yes-men (and women!) and grifters, and their world gets so distorted they start to believe they’re superhuman geniuses.
Zuck at a minimum has shown applications of the method of paired comparisons, as well as the multiarmed bandit problem, to serve the most effective ad engine of modern history.
It’s arguably an evil invention that spies upon us and feeds us misinformation. But no one can argue against it’s efficacy.
Nah. Anyone who looked at history knows that Elon was like this since Paypal days in the 90s.
However, VCs we’re inclined to make such people heroes in the 2014-era of cheap money. Having quirky CEOs like Theranos, FTX, Tesla was hip and hot.
0% interest rates meant that shoving money to idiots was a good financial strategy, and simply outlasting the competition would work. See Jet.com which succeeded.
Uber and Lyft are others from this era of loose money policy. WeWork too. Less successful though.
Today, Tesla is suffering from the same ills as Uber, Lyft, WeWork. Today’s 5.25% interest rate is too much to bare for these insanely run companies.
All that has changed in the past 10 years is a concept called Venture Capitalist submarine money. The VCs ain’t helping Musk anymore, marketing has changed.
All you are feeling is the external influence that online ads, online messaging and hype can do to your brain.
Ex: think of all the free press Elon got when Hollywood said that Iron Man was based off of him in the 2008 movie. That’s kinda-sorta submarine money there. That’s Hollywood telling you subtly to like Elon Musk, and that subversive messaging works.
Turn that off (no one in Hollywood likes Elon anymore) and then the feeling goes away.
I could not have done a bigger 180 on this guy.
180 is 180. Anything more and it would be 181.
Fuck it, I’ll go one step further. Elon Musk used to be an OpenAI board member alongside Sam Altman. In 2022, Elon Musk was the richest man in the world. Unless he is an idiot and treated Sam Altman badly, I am sure Sam Altman must have chatted with him in 2022 (or earlier) to tell about how awesome ChatGPT was going to be. Like, if your former colleague is the richest man in the world, you give that guy a call, right?
So how the hell did he spend $40B on fucking Twitter when Microsoft bought OpenAI for $10B?Wow. That’s something I hadn’t really considered - very good point. As an innovator myself, you can bet your butt that I would be telling the richest man on the planet what advances had been made with the software…
Elon’s mental health clearly didn’t survive COVID.
But lately, Elon Musk seems to be an idiot.
Lately…?
Las Vegas loop, instead of a tunnel you drive in or a subway, he took the worst parts of both and made something worse. The whole is worse than the sum of its parts
I use a car share co-op these days, but if I had to own again, I would count Tesla out of consideration specifically because I don’t want to support Musk.
What is a car share co-op and how does it work? It sounds like it would be a major pita but I don’t want to prejudge.
Where I’m at, you join the coop, and then there are cars all around town. You can rent any of the vehicles for as much time as you want (specific return times or open ended) and insurance and gas is included. Some let you leave them anywhere in town, some you have to return the vehicle to the same spot at the end.
Super handy if you don’t need a vehicle often, or if you need a different class vehicle than what you have (e.g renting a truck to do a move or bring something large home)
It’s really affordable.
I’m in one of these co-ops. Mine, you have to return the car to the same spot. You pay per 15-minute increment up to a daily cap. There’s also a fee per km driven. OTOH the car share handles the insurance, maintenance, cleaning, and even gas (there’s a fleet card in each car). It’s significantly cheaper than owning when you use a car maybe three times a month.
Could be like a carpool app, I had a few coworkers use them when I lived in San Francisco, not sure if that’s what OP is talking about.
I’d been saving to get a new car for a decade but I dumped Tesla from consideration back in 2020 when I saw how they responded to the pandemic. Musk clearly put corporate profits above worker safety. The management team’s job is to find a way to do both. So I bought a Chevy Bolt EUV. It’s a Chevy, right, but damn, it’s the best new car experience I’ve had. That thing is a blast to drive and 130 eMPG is awesome.
Weird to suppose anyone thought this wouldn’t occur
True, but its always good to have proof, even of facts that are “obvious”.
There’s a buyer for every seller
Seriously. Just check out the front page of YouTube when you’re signed out. There’s almost always at least one video there praising Musk, and the people in the comments are treating him like a God who can do no wrong. The general public idolizes him.
The general public idolizes him.
You’ve overestimating the reach of online marketing.
Yes, online pretenders have been paid to pretend to idolize Musk. And this is enough of a trick to get others to idolize Musk. But in my experience, its a small minority of people who pay attention to internet drama or CEOs.
This article is like 3 weeks old…
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And here I am uninterested because they don’t support CarPlay/AA lmao
To be fair, GM just made a big mistake here and they had a fair number of good EVs and Hybrids.
I find it so weird that the guy at the top of the company factors into what car people want to drive. Even more so after the fact, he already got the sale from these people.
Elon Musk’s cult of personality and fake bullshittery was the only reason to ever buy a Tesla in the first place.
Now that he is alienating his core environmental cult of personality, he is now catering to right wing dudes like DeSantis. Presumably because the far right is easier to trick than the old environmental faction.
Surprise surprise, the environmentalists don’t like that.
No reasonable person would overbuy a $50,000 car with as crappy quality, non-functioning windshield wipers or crappy cruise control that loses features every year. (What has 10 years of advancements gotten Tesla? Answer: they lost RADAR and now also lost Ultrasonics this year)
This vehicle gets crappier and more overpriced each year, while competitors advance forward. Today, there is no reason to buy a Tesla over a Mach E or RAV4 Prime.
Personally I think the new electric Hyundai looks really cool. I also agree with your point
Hyundai’s Augmented Reality lane assist looks pretty high tech.
I think I want a heads up display, but I don’t need it to be that over-engineered augmented reality stuff (even if it does look really cool).
It doesn’t.
The survey also found that 87% of Model 3 owners are considering a Tesla for their next vehicles.
That kind of brand loyalty is unheard of. Especially for cars. Given Tesla’s parabolic sales, anyone selling their Tesla because of Musk is in the extreme minority. All of them frequent Lemmy and Reddit.
Some people think the climate is our biggest priority
And some people think your political compass score is our biggest priority.
This kind of dissonance is what makes me laugh at the silliness of it all lol
Where is the dissonance? These people are not in mutually exclusive groups. You can be environmentally conscious to get an EV and yet morally conscious to tell Elmo to fuck off and buy an EV other than Tesla.
It’s laughable in 2023 to think EV = Tesla.
And I’m of the opinion that PHEV is more environmentally friendly anyway.
I get my 40 miles electric per day (well charge), and I minimize the amount of sulfuric acid that needs to run through lithium mines since my PHEV has 1/5th the battery of a Tesla.
These Lithium mines are incredibly dirty from an environmental point of view. I hope that Toyota can reach solid state batteries sooner, but for now we need to minimize Li-ion production
Eh, there’s plenty of alternatives to Tesla nowadays, many of which are even considered superior. So, you can still have climate be your biggest priority while also choosing not to support a piece of shit.
If you think Tesla is there to “save the environment / planet” then I have a cure to selll you for the common cold that works in 7 to 14 days.
Electric cars are part of the solution but manufacturers are not in it for the benefit of the environment, they just want to continue selling cars.
EVs are to save the car industry and its control on us, not the environment.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/ev-transition-column-don-pittis-1.6667698
