The capacity of continuing the real world problem solving is very blurry. Boring is a joke. For Tesla he is not a founder, and they are mostly relying on a 10 year old product (new product is a joke) that'll only maybe saved with tariffs. It's mostly a meme stock company by now. SpaceX is a great success but his job was only providing money through government contracts and having the luck of finding Gwynne Shotwell, seems hard to replicate consistently. Add an ongoing mental breakdown and full on lies (FSD, humans on Mars, Hyperloop, ...) and it doesn't look that good (AI is a bit complex, hard to imagine someone in his state still having the intellectual capacity to really handle this). But yeah a new meme stock can still be a good bet for investors.
> For Tesla he is not a founder, and they are mostly relying on a 10 year old product (new product is a joke) that'll only maybe saved with tariffs.
This is both true and irrelevant. When Musk took over, the Tesla Death Watch was running strong because it had made 100-and-something individual vehicles in total and relied entirely on finding more investors to not go bankrupt.
What Tesla needed is exactly what Musk is: a salesman who can sell a dream to both investors and customers.
> Add an ongoing mental breakdown and full on lies (FSD, humans on Mars
Humans on Mars shouldn't be on that list, even if he's wrong about every specific — it's the point of everything else he does.
Tesla is still entirely supported by investors, government subsidies and hype. Nothing has changed. Without credits and customer subsidies they wouldn’t ever have made anything.
You forgot the 6010172 vehicles they sold — Musk is respons for at least 6010025 of those, his predecessors for at most 147.
This is a pretty big thing to overlook, regardless of subsidies, as it's at least in the low hundreds of billions of dollars of revenue.
Hype, sure, that's the lighting every company wishes it could bottle for their product launches. Even the metaphorical launches rather than Musk's more literal use of the word: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk%27s_Tesla_Roadster
Is "hype" a dirty word for you? Because my point is, that brought in actual sales, which they didn't meaningfully have before.
> Without credits and customer subsidies they wouldn’t ever have made anything
And? The sole purpose of those things is to convince the private sector to get something done. You're complaining that they worked.
Nothing. That’s just the money he needs to buy compute and staff in today’s market. He’s boasting about 100k GPUs. That’s 60k per unit including staff, power, racks, repair, upgrades, failures, development etc. It doesn’t even cover costs.
The Elon Musk Bubble, I really hope so. That’s so much capital and attention that could be spent on actual research instead of over-hyped and over-promised gimmicks
I wonder if the investors are just like crypto-bros and pyramid-schemers. Knowing it's bullshit, but hoping the next dumbass will come tomorrow, next week, etc, to buy it off them where they can make a profit...
Considering the price of e.g. BTC, maybe thinking "People with money can't be this dumb!" is the dumbass move...
That’s when SBF told Sequoia about the so-called super-app: “I want FTX to be a place where you can do anything you want with your next dollar. You can buy bitcoin. You can send money in whatever currency to any friend anywhere in the world. You can buy a banana. You can do anything you want with your money from inside FTX.”
Suddenly, the chat window on Sequoia’s side of the Zoom lights up with partners freaking out.
“I LOVE THIS FOUNDER,” typed one partner.
“I am a 10 out of 10,” pinged another.
“YES!!!” exclaimed a third.
What Sequoia was reacting to was the scale of SBF’s vision. It wasn’t a story about how we might use fintech in the future, or crypto, or a new kind of bank. It was a vision about the future of money itself—with a total addressable market of every person on the entire planet.
“I sit ten feet from him, and I walked over, thinking, Oh, shit, that was really good,” remembers Arora. “And it turns out that that fucker was playing League of Legends through the entire meeting.”
“We were incredibly impressed,” Bailhe says. “It was one of those your-hair-is-blown-back type of meetings.”
Did x.ai just become worth more than x.com? We must be nearing the bubble popping...