The real reason is, Elon has SpaceX and xAI. He can create an illusion of synergy and orders of magnitude advancements to boost the market cap and pocket all the money. He realized long time ago you don't need to deliver to play the market cap game, in fact it's better if you are selling a story far in the future rather than a something you can deliver now.
Ok, he delivered your Tesla and your Starlink, but so far he has hasn't delivered your Robotaxi, your Optimus, your lunar lander, your space datacenter etc. And the list keeps getting longer instead of shorter...
>Robotaxi, your Optimus, your lunar lander, your space datacenter etc. And the list keeps getting longer instead of shorter...
Lets go through this one by one
[1]Robotaxi.
Someone just drove coast to coast USA fully on autopilot. I drive my tesla every day, and i literally NEVER disengage autopilot. It gets me to work and back home without fail, to the grocery store, to literally anywhere i need. Whats not full self driving about that? I got in two crashes before i got my Tesla cause i was a dumb teen, but i'm sure my Tesla is a much better driver than my younger sister. Politically it's not FSD, but in reality, it has been for a while.
[2]
Optimus has gone through three revisions and has hand technology that is 5+ years ahead of the competition. Even if they launched it as a consumer product now, i'm sure a million people would buy it just as a cool toy/ gadget. AKA a successfull product.
[3] Lunar Lander
Starship, a fully reusable, 2 stage rocket that has gone through 25 revisions and is 95% flight proven and has even deployed dummy starlinks. 10+ years ahead of everyone except maybe stoke.
[4]Space Datacenter
Have you ever used starlink? They have all the pieces they need... Elon build a giant datacenter in 6 monmths when it takes 3-4 years usually. He has more compute than anybody and Grok is the most intelligent AI by all the metrics outside googles. Combine that with Starship, which can launch 10X the capacity for 10% of the cost, and what reason do you have to doubt him here?
Granted... it always takes him longer than he says, but he always eventually comes through.
Eventually comes through? Have you forgotten Hyperloop, new roadster, instant battery swaps, tunnels to replace all traffic, your car appreciating in value, your car being used as a robotaxi during downtime to make you money, semi convoys, etc etc?
They don't come through on every thing but they come through on innovative more than any other groups of companies I can think of. Tesla, SpaceX, Starlink... you really don't think they've delivered incredible products on these things already?
Also, hyperloop wasn't something he really stuck with.
hyperloop got open sourced. He spawned and gave engineering support for a wide variety of companies, i think richard branson started one too/ provided a bunch of funding. He saw the biggest problem as the tunnel boring, so he focused on that and thought the other companies would figure it out. One of the OG's from SpaceX now runs boring company and they are on v5-6 of the tunnel boring machine?
He makes big prenouncements, but once he gets in the engineering details... they cease to make sense. Tesla in tunnels makes more sense because they can be end to end. Instead of a hypoerloop, you can drive a cybertruck fast AF down a tunnel. (Again, tunnel boring is the bottleneck here.)
New roadster is on like revision 20+. They had 4 roadsters in 2018, each different from the last. Last i've heard on this, the roadster is going "to fly".I think what he means by this is they are going to add krypton, or some sort of thruster to the car. They don't want to launch the roadster to compete with the cyber truck.
Instant battery swaps were for rigidity purposes. If you cast the battery directly into the car, the battery becomes part of the frame, resulting in a much smoother ride. They did have a couple prototypes of Battery swaps, but they decided not to pursue it and instead focus on improving the megachargers.
Tunnels to replace all traffic was discussed above a bit, but he did do the vegas loop and is doing it for waaaaayyyyyyy less than any other underground system. Something like $42m for the whole vegas loop. I think the boring company has like 5-6 ongoing projects around the US. Did you expect him to do it over night? They custom built a boring machine, like 6 times over and are doing projects all over the US.
your car appreciating in value... I mean, they actually kinda did... If you had an early enough reservation on the model 3, you could make a big flip. Thats why they put a clause in for the cybertruck where you couldn't flip. Also, renting it out on E-turo was very profitable for the longest time. All jokes aside, cause i know that's not what you're talking about... Yeah, that's a bold face lie from elons part. Because latest models only are going to run on AI6 chip.
Semi Convoys are an awesome idea and could totally work. I mean... like i said, AI self driving is pretty good. Especially on freeways. Streets, not 100% solved, but i literally never have to disengage on the freeway. They just built an entire dedicated manufacturing facility that started commisioning this month for the Semi. You will see this alot more often. Obviously they'll still have human drivers, but i'm sure they can write some software to make this possible and provide some "draft effect" for the semis.
> Along for the trip this time were Warren Ahner, an AI exec and former autonomy executive for a major automaker, and self-driving enthusiast Paul Pham. Both are deeply knowledgeable about Tesla’s Full-Self Driving suite and Roy stressed that he couldn’t have completed the trip without them.
Interesting - wonder when it will be ready for use by non-experts
He does (or at least a good proportion) if you want to use as precedent for delivering on these promises, though. Especially for the larger more extreme statements and not just buying himself into an existing business.
His investors are quite happy with his success rate. He is constantly building new stuff. And as a consumer who has had great experience with every product I've bought, so am I
No one buys into Elon's firms because he's expecting dividends.
His investors are not investing because of his success rate in delivering on his promises. His investors are investing exclusively because they believe that stock they buy now will be worth more tomorrow. They all know that's most likely not because Elon delivers anything concrete (because he only does that in what, 20% of cases?), but because Elon rides the hype train harder tomorrow. But they don't care if it's hype or substance, as long as numbers go up.
Elon's investors are happy with his success rate only in terms of continuously generating hype. Which, I have to admit, he's been able to keep up longer now than I ever thought possible.
Theranos were also hyping a lot and trying to build some stuff. There is some threshold (to be decided where) after which something is more of a fraud than a hype.
Also these days stock market doesn't have much relation to real state of economy - it's in many ways a casino.
Not sure who determines the threshold, he certainly goes to court more than your average person, but these are not start ups, they are large companies under a lot of scrutiny. I don't think the comparison is valid
>he certainly goes to court more than your average person
Yes because he sues a lot of entities for silly things such as some advertisers declining to buy ads that display next to pro-hitler posts, or news outlets for posting unaltered screenshots of a social media site he acquired.
If Theranos promised ten amazing innovations or useful products, got 7 of them to market to great success while revolutionizing their industry I'd forgive them if their other 3 products turned out to be hype.
> The hype to substance ratio isn't quite as important as some choose to beleive
Musk's ratio is such that his utterances are completely free from actionable information. If he says something, it may or may not happen and even if it does happen the time frame (and cost) is unlikely to be correct.
I don't get why anyone would invest their money on this basis.
Remember when people said that Starlink would never happen? What about when "experts" said that a private space company would never launch rockets. Or that no one would by an electric car made by an upstart company? Or when people said that the downsizing at Twitter would cause the company to collapse and that we could expect it to be defunct and dead within a year?
Some combination of the two, for sure. doesn't mean that Musk can't keep doing it. however you describe it or define it, it's a proven strategy at this point. I'm not sure Larry knew how Musk would make him good on Twitter, but he knew enough about Musk to be confident it would happen.
I think this is why he gets away with it. A "win" is a product delivered years late for 3x the promised MSRP with 1/10th the expected sales. With wins like these, what would count as a loss?
He gets away with it for one reason only, and because he consistently delivers good returns on capital.
Most of Tesla's revenue derives from Model Y and FSD subs. I agree that Cybertruck was a marketing ploy. Don't think it was ever intended to be materially revenue generating.
Revenue has flatlined, but investors' confidence comes from Musk's track record for delivering good returns to investors. I think we can agree Musk succeeded in 2020 to 2025 in this regard. Whether you are confident he can do it again over next five years is the key question.
I'm personally more persuaded by the argument that Tesla is a meme-stock at this point - like much of crypto, it runs on "vibes", not solid fundamentals.
But even if share price is the metric for success, 33.6% over 5 years is like 6% compounded annually, which is okay I guess? [0]
What'd be the point of inflating market caps like this when it's obvious they'll crash the moment the owner tries to liquidate any of it before the promises are kept?
The story is that they have a person (or people?) who are REALLY good at managing him and shoving him through the SpaceX offices so that he things he's contributing and out the back door before he has time to fuck anything up.
The product Elon has been most directly involved in is the Cybertruck which is a complete disaster. When talking about Elon you have to specify pre drug addict Elon and ketamine fried brain Elon. The latter makes very bad decisions.
Please stop posting these throwaway, sneering replies, no matter how bad the comment you're replying to. Just downvote it, and if you must comment, do so substantively.
