I see a lot of "I bought this before Elon went crazy" stickers on Teslas. He really seems to have made an impression on the customer base that already was willing to give Tesla money.
I never imagined in 2018 that I would go from “Elon Musk is so cool, like a real life Tony Stark!” to “Elon Musk should get no more than 30 minutes direct sunlight per day as he serves his prison sentence,” and for legions of his former customers this is the moderate stance.
Tesla is cooked, it’s hilarious that he’s now demanding a trillion dollars given the wanton destruction he’s inflicted on the brand.
Back when he first came out with his hyperloop plan I thought this guy was a genius who could do no wrong. The CEO of my small company at the time was recruited personally by musk to work for him at Tesla and I thought he was so lucky.
Then Musk's pedo accusation came out and it was all downhill from there. My ex CEO lasted a year which was puzzling at the time but completely understandable now.
Like you I think Musk should be serving time for fraud, among other things
Never meet your heroes. People are just people, they are imperfect to various degrees. Wealth doesn't change you, it amplifies who you already are. When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.
(own several Teslas, early Tesla investor, we win or we learn, I will not spend another dollar with Tesla until he has no control of or economic exposure to the org)
I hear you on "imperfect to various degrees"... but I think that's being quite generous with respect to his leap into full blown fascism and eugenics.
And I say this as an OG fan-boy, myself. [Tho I started championing that there's no such thing as a benevolent billionaire well before everyone else started jumping off the Elon train]
Don't comply in advance. HN is pretty tolerant for just speaking your mind, as long as you do so fairly, do not exaggerate and resort to personal attacks.
You can say 'that's a stupid idea' but not 'you're stupid', even if most people would draw that conclusion after evaluating the stupid idea.
As for Musk, fuck him and the horse he rode in on and I'm really sorry that YC chose to give him a platform. Musk and his colleague billionaires are the biggest risk to society that we have, and I don't care what they currently vote for or whose pockets they are lining. The lot of them are negating our whole system of governance because money = power and they are abusing that power, both to get more power and to diminish the powers that we have historically relied upon to keep us safe.
Concentrating that much wealth is problematic when it is old men in Rome and their churches, it is a much bigger problem when it is tech savvy single individuals who collude openly with politicians and autocrats/dictators/wannabe dictators.
At least that guy in Rome pretends to have some morals (though, as we know now the Holy Roman Catholic Church is a hotbed of crime and most likely has been so since a really long time).
The other side of this coin is that investors of the techno reactionary species love the way Elon splashes around his money on right wing parties in the US and Europe.
Imagine yourself pitching investors and telling them that a humanoid hand for a humanoid robot is going to make an amazing surgeon. Just imagine that. Your potential investor audience no doubt is familiar with existing surgical robots. Do you think they could suppress a laugh while you tell them that. And yet, the big investor class continues to give Tesla a price to earnings ratio above 300.
If there is one thing I've learned in the last 18 years since founding TMC then it is that investors are not usually very rational. There are exceptions, but for the most part it is just gambling with other people's money, externalize the bad takes and pocket the difference on the wins. It is only rational in the sense that those that partake in it know that they are doing this and that as long as they're the house they don't mind you coming in to place a bet or two. See also: stock market.
