Yet another Hacker News

38 points andsoitis 1 hour ago 39 comments

catigula 1 hour ago | parent

>More than 60 fatalities have been linked to Tesla’s driver-assistance systems. Talk about something that could put a dent in your image!

That seems pretty low?

Driving is extremely dangerous.

yostrovs 1 hour ago | parent

Yes and "linked" is a weasel word to imply something without making a definite statement for which there's no proof.

blakesterz 1 hour ago | parent

This site has numbers and sources: https://www.tesladeaths.com/

darkstar_16 47 minutes ago | parent

2013-2025 and only 2 linked to FSD ? The rest are human errors ? FSD sounds better than human drivers just going by that data. How many people have, for example, BMW killed in 12 years ?

raincole 1 hour ago | parent

It is. However, "Tesla statistically saved lifes" doesn't make an exciting news article.

kennywinker 34 minutes ago | parent

Except absolute numbers are meaningless. You need to know driving hours or miles to know the scale. E.g. deaths per 100,000mi or deaths per 100,000hrs.

testing22321 1 hour ago | parent

> you see that he’s a creator of mirages who promises more than he delivers

There is no doubt he has promised many things that have never been delivered, or delivered extremely late.

He (his companies/teams) have also utterly changed the space launch landscape to the point of making the rest of the world irrelevant. Changed the energy market across the globe, delivered exceptional electric vehicles and (finally) put a car on the road for public use with no mirrors, steering wheel or pedals. The production line is also world leading, as stated by every auto CEO that has toured it.

Does he over promise and exaggerate? Undoubtedly.

But he does also deliver.

bix6 1 hour ago | parent

Ok and how about his character as a human being?

testing22321 40 minutes ago | parent

I’ve never met the guy, but many reports are very bad.

pavel_lishin 1 hour ago | parent

> He (his companies/teams) have also utterly changed the space launch landscape to the point of making the rest of the world irrelevant

For now. Other countries are catching up, same as they are with electric vehicles.

testing22321 39 minutes ago | parent

News at 10: future products will surpass current products.

That is always true, in every industry.

michael0church 1 hour ago | parent

He has one effect, which can be good or bad. He’s an attention magnet. He didn’t make Tesla what it was, but he also fucked it up less than most CEOs do. Most CEOs want to make real changes. He just let smart people do great work so he could be on (and eventually buy) Twitter.

His flamboyance raised the profile of electric vehicles. That was good, because we’re gonna need them. When this actual work was the relevant factor, we got DOGE, an unforgivable disaster.

pavel_lishin 1 hour ago | parent

> Most CEOs want to make real changes. He just let smart people do great work so he could be on (and eventually buy) Twitter.

I'm not sure that's the case:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-01-17/elon-musk...

> When Musk is hyper-focused on daily operations, it can often lead to extra work — he’s inserted himself in projects and demanded changes for sometimes arbitrary reasons, former employees say.

> For instance, current and former employees describe times that Musk has deemed certain hardware as having too many tubes, connectors, or wires, or just not generally fitting his preferred design aesthetic. He’s demanded that employees rework and simplify systems, leading employees to spend time justifying why certain parts exist or triggering major redesigns and work that can take weeks to accomplish. Sometimes, that work ultimately has to be reversed when components that were discarded ultimately are needed for the final design.

2PqboPPmKegvanx 52 minutes ago | parent

CEOs who act the way he does are horrible CEOs 100% of the time - doesn't matter if the company has 10, 100 or 100,000 employees.

simondotau 48 minutes ago | parent

Musk has said as much himself, adding: "You may have to add [parts or processes] back later. In fact, if you do not end up adding back at least 10% of them, then you didn't delete enough."

bmitc 55 minutes ago | parent

Does he actually deliver? Isn't SpaceX ran by grownups that are not him? Isn't it well known that when he's actually involved in trying to deliver that he gets in the way and slows everything down?

> delivered exceptional electric vehicles

Tesla's ranking for quality and reliability and many cases of fraud regarding warranty repairs would disagree rather heavily with "exceptional".

And your analysis ignores his many, many business failures and his overall negative affect on things and culture.

Zigurd 47 minutes ago | parent

He is the archetype of creation by exhortation. How many people destroyed their health trying to make FSD work by the end of this year for 10 years?

misiti3780 37 minutes ago | parent

As someone who uses it everyday, it's a very impressive piece of technology, is it not?

Zigurd 36 minutes ago | parent

What does FSD stand for, remind me.

gumby 22 minutes ago | parent

Something that it isn’t.

simondotau 40 minutes ago | parent

John Carmack is someone whose opinion is worth a heck of a lot to me. If he vouches for Musk as a hands-on rocket engineer, I’m not going to argue with him.

bmitc 35 minutes ago | parent

One narcissist opining on another narcissist isn't what I pay attention to.

> If he vouches for Musk as a hands-on rocket engineer

Employees have said otherwise. There was one report where Musk barely understood how to run a Python script.

simondotau 25 minutes ago | parent

I’m sorry but Python ecosystem is a sick joke, and it is not discrediting that someone who doesn’t deal with python every day isn’t fluent on the magical commands for running pip3 within venv.

To this day I still don’t remember what the command is to activate a venv. I wouldn’t touch that horrible language[0] if I didn’t have an LLM to deal with it for me.

[0] that’s unfair, it’s actually a very nice language and I like it a lot, but the toolchain surrounding it is disgusting

tekla 35 minutes ago | parent

Tom Mueller also seems to explicitly support this

2PqboPPmKegvanx 54 minutes ago | parent

>Does he over promise and exaggerate? Undoubtedly.

>But he does also deliver.

Shotwell deserves 99.99% of the SpaceX credit over Musk. anyone who says differently needs to take off their Musk-coloured glasses

also there are very good reasons no one else has released cars on public roads with no mirrors, steering wheels or pedals.

simondotau 38 minutes ago | parent

John Carmack says differently. What colour are his glasses?

Ydarbleoj 49 minutes ago | parent

Delivers an ungodly amount of space pollution that's for sure.

tekla 40 minutes ago | parent

The other posters in this thread seem to blame Glenn Shotwell for that

rsynnott 19 minutes ago | parent

> Changed the energy market across the globe

... Wait, how's that?

> delivered exceptional electric vehicles

I mean, I'll give you 'exceptional'. Not exceptionally _good_, though.

bix6 1 hour ago | parent

Monster.

unethical_ban 1 hour ago | parent

SpaceX is amazing, and he may receive due credit for the "vision" of pushing forward the state of the art in electric vehicles and rockets.

We (society) often glosses over personal failings of popular figures. But given the level of outright lies he has funded in elections and how much money he has spent to get anti-democracy politicians in power in the US, one should not waver in their condemnation of the man's character.

Zigurd 45 minutes ago | parent

Fascism and racism are more than personal failings when you splash around hundreds of millions of dollars to, for example, get neofascists elected in a German state.

unethical_ban 24 minutes ago | parent

Glad we agree. I can't tell if I'm being downvoted by anti-Musk people who didn't read the whole comment, or pro-Musk people mad that I called him out for funding disinformation campaigns.

nancyminusone 28 minutes ago | parent

Musk has pulled off a reverse von Braun. Von Braun was a Nazi who used slave labor, but whose past was overshadowed by later building cool rockets. Musk built cool rockets, but his past has been overshadowed by association with similarly evil people.

spottedmarley 1 hour ago | parent

That Musk dude needs a hobby.

simonebrunozzi 45 minutes ago | parent

Apparently, he has at least one. [0]

[0]: https://babynames.com/blogs/celebrities/all-of-elon-musks-ch...

serf 1 hour ago | parent

3 hrs and 52 minutes of Musk.

I didn't even want to sit in front of a screen for 2 hours for Bob Dylan, sheesh.

ChrisArchitect 36 minutes ago | parent

Between this and the Elizabeth Holmes one, just adding to the 'positive' Silicon Valley/tech/VC public marketing right now... /s

(Nathan Fielder's Elizabeth Holmes Doc Met with Shock and Awe at Secret Screening https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49613598)