Seems to me the issue here is overall strategy.

The overall strategy seemed to have been foster discussion, then sell that content to AI scrapers and search engines while also collecting ad revenue.

Problem is, if the AI search engine scrapes the answer out of the discussion, they’ll often answer the user’s question and thus you won’t get the ad revenue from the click. And if you need to log in to see the discussion you’ll lose the ad revenue from search referrals.

In short- ‘we created a business letting others cannibalize the value out of our database and now we’re shocked there’s less value in our database’.

Are you referring to Martin Eberhard, the one who kept pushing for the 2-speed transmission even after multiple attempts at it failed?

Okay fair opinion is the wrong word- it contains what I believe to be provable facts.

Would you care to disprove them? Or is their incorrectness simply your opinion? :)

So I don’t get to have an opinion you disagree with without being a shill?

Yeah I’ve talked to a number of ex-Elon company people also.

He is damn near impossible to work for. I’ve heard him called ‘the pigeon’- he swoops in, craps on whatever you’ve been pouring your life into for 6 months, and flies off. He has zero sense of work life balance, made only slightly tolerable by the fact that however hard he drives his people he drives himself even harder. Dude’s the richest man in the world and he lived in an off the shelf modular house for a few years because he couldn’t be bothered spending the time to buy a real house, sleeps under his desk half the time.

He also sets near impossible goals and then gets his people to meet them. You read about Raptor engine evolution, what’s less discussed was the insane pressure from Elon to make them more powerful and easier to build. Less machine time, avoiding exotic materials like Inconel, more chamber pressure, etc. But here we are.

Or let me ask this— if Elon wasn’t a factor, then why didn’t anyone before SpaceX a. produce a privately owned orbital rocket, and b. produce any sort of reusability in an orbital rocket? If Elon wasn’t a factor, then why didn’t anyone before Tesla sell a full production electric car?

thank you for an intelligent comment that’s not just DURR ELON BAD

I’ve driven a bunch of electric cars. In terms of driving feel, Tesla is good but not great. The suspension (pre-refresh model Y) is stiff without feeling particularly sporty, the steering is decent but not amazing, accel is above average, and I like the one pedal driving but some people hate that. The interior (of any of them, including the ‘luxury’ model X/S) lacks some creature comforts compared to many others in the price range. If not for the low CG reducing body roll in turns it’d probably not be nearly as fun to drive.

In terms of overall ownership experience though, it’s fantastic. I like driving, but the few points I lose in not having something more sporty like a Taycan or Volvo XC40 EV (which is super fun to drive) or a Polestar 2 (even more fun to drive) is made up for by everything else. The software is fantastic and it’s continually updated OTA with actual features, unlike traditional automakers. There’s an absolute minimum of bullshit upsells- no subscribing for heated seats for example, only subscriptions are the connectivity package and FSD. The app and phone key work 100%. Unlike virtually every other automaker, Tesla isn’t data mining my driving and text messages to sell the data to insurance companies and marketers.

And quite honestly- FSD is a huge part of the package. I love driving, but I drive a lot and I don’t like having to when I’m not in the mood. If I’m blasting around some twisty roads on a nice day of course I’m driving. But if I’m on the highway for 2 hours, that’s just a boring slog.

Finally there’s service. Tesla comes to me for most things, and I’ve needed VERY little. The service manual is free online. There’s NO upsell.

Speaking of upsell- the process of buying the car was BY FAR the best of any car I’ve ever bought. There was ZERO pressure, just people available to answer questions. And no dealer markup, no ‘market adjustment’, no haggling over price, no four-square scam to get me to pay more than I want to, no page full of dealer options. Here’s the car, here’s the price, put in a credit card and show up with a bank check on delivery day. I’ve purchased a couple of ‘nice’ cars in my life, from ‘good’ dealers who I really like, but I’d pick the Tesla experience EVERY time.

If I wanted an EV purely on how it drives- based on what I’ve driven so far I’d go for a Polestar 2 or a Taycan.

As a practical vehicle- Tesla all the way.

I don’t think Musk made electric cars happen any faster.

Disagree. I watched the EV space for a long time. Read some historical articles- even going back into the 1990s electric cars were always ‘10 years away’. Batteries WERE always the reason. But until Tesla, every car company was focused on large format cells. GM did large format NiMH for the EV1, and it worked pretty good, except the instant they were allowed to they sold that tech to Chevron who only licensed it out to companies not building BEVs. Same thing with lithium- large format lithium had a lot of problems including runaway safety issues that hadn’t been solved.

Elon’s contribution was to make a pack full of 18650 laptop cells, coddle it with great thermal management and armor, and call the result a vehicle battery. He saw that innovation was happening a lot faster in the small cells than in large format cells, so those were what he’d use.
It was one of those ‘that can’t possibly be right… but it seems to work better than anything else’ type things.
So back in 2006, when legacy automakers were saying profitable EVs were not physically possible, Tesla was making money selling Roadsters. In 2012 when legacy automakers were saying a profitable mass market EV wasn’t possible, Tesla was making money selling Model S.
As far as I’m concerned, Tesla essentially embarrassed legacy automakers into building EVs.

charging stations, but hardly alone in saying this stuff, and mostly appropriated government money for these things rather than using his own.

I’d point out that many companies have taken government funds to build EV chargers, none anywhere near as successful as Tesla. There’s 2x more Superchargers than all other DC fast chargers combined. And that’s NOT because nobody wanted to build them.

21% higher than average death rate in crashes (coming in 21st out of 26 compared brands)

Love to see that stat? Everything I’ve read suggests the exact opposite.

There’s numerous examples of him barging into things and fucking them up when he thinks he knows better.

Correct. Twitter and his various maladventures with Trump are prime examples.

He’s a fucking idiot and always has been.

Incorrect. Provably incorrect.

SpaceX was basically all him.

Tesla was basically all him- he started out as just an investor but when Eberhard was screwing up the Roadster’s gearbox he took over, made the (obvious in hindsight) to replace the finicky shifting transmission with a simple reduction gear and a larger motor for torque, and got the car out the door. Model S, X, 3, Y, all him.

Elon is good at some things, bad at realizing what he’s not good at, VERY bad at understanding that other people’s feelings matter to the goal of getting things done.

Do you read the news?

Of the various privacy invading shit that goes into cars, Tesla is probably the least bad.

I’ve been following Tesla pretty closely since long before the first Roadster came out. This is false.

There were a few co-founders of Tesla. One of them had opened an LLC. Elon and others bought into that because it was faster than forming a new LLC from scratch.

The original Roadster was mostly Martin Eberhard in charge, Elon was a backseat investor who wasn’t very involved with the design. Eberhard’s design used a two-speed gearbox- a real engineering challenge to make a gearbox that can shift gears under load at 15,000 RPM. They went through multiple designs which all failed reliability tests after significant engineering expense. After a couple of those is when Elon stepped in, pushed out Eberhard, and took over the company. Elon then decided the car would have a single reduction gear, no shifting, and a larger motor to provide the necessary torque. In hindsight this was the right decision as pretty much every EV today uses the same setup.

Elon was then significantly involved in the design and engineering of the Model S, X, 3, etc.

If you want more info search archive.org for the Tesla blog any pre-Roadster timeframe.

I drive one. It’s a slightly older model, generation 3 hardware, back from the days when everybody loved Elon (before he threw in with the GOP).

The car is fantastic. FSD is fantastic. Love the guy or hate him, it’s the best car I’ve ever owned by a significant margin.

As someone who actually drives FSD, and the older version of it too, it is very good. On the highway it drives better than I do. At least once it has saved me from what otherwise would have been a serious collision- I was in the middle lane minding my own business, suddenly the car slams on the brakes and swerves into the left lane. I’m thinking it’s lost its mind, when a pickup truck comes barreling straight from an on-ramp into the left lane. Had the car not reacted it’s entirely likely they would have crashed into me.

I don’t excuse Elon’s politics. I think he has done a lot of good for our civilization with SpaceX and Tesla and bringing about the era of actual electric cars (which previously were perpetually always 10 years away). At the same time, I think his efforts to get Trump reelected have been extremely harmful. He does not tolerate incompetence in his companies and I don’t understand why he tolerates it in his politics.

So it’s valid to argue the guy is a net negative on society, it’s valid to argue he has helped benefit politicians who resemble Nazis, and it’s certainly valid to criticize his ‘from the heart’ gesture that really did look an awful lot like a Nazi salute.

The guy still makes an excellent car.

IMHO there’s no reason any foreign company should own any land.

China has a good model. If you are a foreign company and you want to do business in China, you need to find a local partner. This ensures that at least some of the profits stay within China and the nation is not simply extracted for foreign benefit.

This guy seems to want to open the fire hose of extraction. I don’t blame these people for protesting. They have the right idea.

Not the only one.

I think there’s a number of causes, but the biggest one is pretty simple- the death of boredom.

You are stuck in an airport waiting for your flight. It leaves in an hour. What do you do?
You whip out your phone and fire up your favorite social media and scroll. And the hour disappears.
Or maybe you watch a movie. Or read the news. Or whatever- your digital mental babysitter will entertain you.

What you don’t do, is be bored. Boredom is now totally optional, and by default it is suppressed and must be actively chosen.

This sounds like a good thing, but the reality is boredom is a time that’s vital for our minds to process and dream and imagine. And we killed that.

So that time when someone might contemplate taking up a new hobby, contemplate a new project, contemplate building something cool? Gone.

I don’t blame you.

You are correct that America is no longer a trustworthy reliable partner. And of that IMHO Trump is a symptom rather than a cause. The simple fact is that the American people have become disconnected from their own politics. So every 4ish years maybe half to 2/3 of the country opens one eyelid just enough to either blindly vote for whatever primary color they subscribe to, or to vote for whoever’s TV ads sucked less. The number that do real research is sadly very low.

The result is we flip flop back and forth between the red asshole and the blue asshole. Red seems to have more assholes the last couple decades but it varies when you look at the big picture. The real problem though isn’t red or blue is that the sense of national identity is gone. Go back 20 or 30 years and someone like Trump would be laughed off the stage in the first primary because rounding up immigrants with secret police squads is obviously not how America operates. Now people get so caught up in the ‘us vs them’ divisive narrative that they actually think the ends justify the means (or more likely, they just don’t research the reality of what’s going on and just say ‘yeah get rid of illegal immigrants!’)

The point though is that no set of policies, no matter how good or bad, can be assumed to last more than 4ish years. Look at Ukraine- Biden helped them out because defending freedom is what America stands for, Trump tried to shake them down for mineral rights then washed his hands of the problem.

So yeah, the fact that we as a nation are behaving this way is a failure. But the bigger failure is that we are so disconnected from the actions of our own government that we largely no longer care. We bitch about it online but ask anyone complaining online if they’ve done more than 1 hour of independent candidate research over the last decade? I’d be shocked if you get 1%.

Until that changes I’m sorry to say to anyone in the rest of the world, don’t assume any USA policy will last any longer than the administration that enacted it.

Personally if the situation was reversed, or if I was in charge of Canada, I’d just set a policy that each month, there will be a flat rate tariff on all US imported goods that will, over the next 30 days, be equal to the $ value of last month’s tariffs paid on all exports to USA. That money will be collected and made available to cover any tariffs USA charged on Canadian imports.

Result is the more USA tariffs Canadian goods coming south, the more tariff will need to be paid to sell stuff going north. And thus fewer people in Canada will buy USA goods because of the tariff, but people in USA will buy Canadian goods because the tariff is paid for by Canadian government.
Only works up to a point, but will definitely create a trade imbalance in Canada’s favor. And we can say you want it to go away, kill the tariff on your side and it’s automatically gone in 30 days.

This is a good thing and a bad thing.
I’d agree that there may well be less unity between states. I believe that’s actually what our founders intended- individual states united, without local/state politics being an afterthought.
Problem is our system in concept is based on the idea that the only good source of authority for how to govern is the people who are governed taking an active interest in their own government. Sadly that kind of engaged population hasn’t been the case for a while. Sadly the ones who are pushing for this are more so our conservatives- not for any useful reason but because it gives them more ability to set discriminatory policies against gay people and enforce religion based socially conservative policy in primarily conservative states.

IMHO the only thing that can save us is if the American people once again take active interest in the running of their government. This is easier said than done.

Sadly I don’t think it’s intentional. Our education is increasingly focused on tests over critical thinking- and somewhere along the line we decided it’s more harmful socially to hold an underperforming kid back than to put him in the next grade unprepared. We’re now having problems with college professors having to rework the course material to account for the fact that some students can’t read well if at all (I really wish I was kidding). Meanwhile our population too distracted trying to make ends meet, and so we are easy to exploit with extreme rhetoric. And our news is corporate focused on eyeballs over education so the problem gets worse.
I’m sorry that kind of culture is spreading :( I would strongly encourage you focus on maintaining your educational systems to a high standard.

I love my country but I’m concerned it may literally be too late to save us and stop an Idiocracy-like future, especially with the onset of AI. I really hope it’s not. But I see my own colleagues basically offloading their own critical thinking to ChatGPT and I see how it makes them unable to think for themselves :\ And I worry a lot.

We don’t have strong leadership willing to actually make a commitment to Canadians.

As as sad as depressing as that is, we are better off than the alternative

Sounds just like American politics in most cases.

Sometimes we pick the ‘better off’ sometimes we don’t.

Thanks :)

American here. I love my country.

But they should absolutely turn the screws.

Canada has always been a good friend to the US, both in peace and in wartime. When we had wildfires Canada sent us aircraft, crews, supplies. When we were at war in Iraq and Afghanistan Canada sent us some of the best sniper teams anywhere. Canada has always been a peacetime friend and trade partner and we exchange a lot of goods, services, and tourism in both directions.

And then we decide to fuck them over for no reason. We spent 3-4 decades offshoring every bit of American manufacturing and willingly, gleefully, built ourselves a giant trade imbalance because doing so increased shareholder value. Now we realize that might be a bad thing so what do we do? We fuck over our friends, one of the few countries that stood by us through thick and thin. Canada has done nothing to deserve this.

If I were a Canadian, I’d be right fucking pissed (politely of course) that our 100+ year friend is doing this. And quite frankly, I’d be right.

So yeah, while I want my country to succeed, in this instance we deserve to fail and we should fail. Canada deserves better than this.

Oh yeah I agree on both concepts- too much death, and if US did agree to that then it’s on us to try to push Israel to follow it.

My point stands though that we promised something that a. we cannot guarantee, and b. have no intention of even trying to make happen.

Lol

Yeah we can absolutely do those things, and some of them we probably should just on general principle. I have always been of the belief that if you give a guy a gun and he shoots somebody, and you give him another gun and he shoots somebody else, you may not be responsible for the first shooting but you’re definitely responsible for the second. And all of the ones that come after that.

So if you’re going to argue that we should take a harder stance with Israel, I’m definitely not going to disagree. Whether that will actually happen is a completely different story.

However even if we weren’t going to strong-arm Israel, it’s basic dealmaking 101 that while bluffing is acceptable in some situations, when it comes time to put the cards on the table and play them, you can’t play a bluff.

I could see this as a comedy skit

Trump: if you reopen the Strait Israel will get out of Lebanon. Israel: no we won’t.
Iran: okay we will open the strait and Israel will leave Lebanon. Israel: no we won’t leave Lebanon.
Trump: okay we have a deal!
Iran: Why isn’t Israel leaving Lebanon?
Israel: is my phone on mute or something?