Yea in retrospect this is easy to say and it is trivial to join the dots, but the real leg work was done by John Carreyrou. He single-handedly investigated, recognized the fraud and exposed Theranos when everyone was writing rosy stories about Elizabeth Holmes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Carreyrou
> He won the Pulitzer Prize twice and is well known for having exposed the fraudulent practices of the multibillion-dollar blood-testing company Theranos in a series of articles published in The Wall Street Journal.
>> Yea in retrospect this is easy to say and it is trivial to join the dots
And it likely is happening again, someone who is being heralded now will be exposed and we'll go through this important exercise again. My money is on Musk's number coming up.
It is a pity that charlatanry seems so profitable of late. It's always been around and in some respects you can admire a con artist's cleverness, but to me there's a difference between fleecing some investors looking to make a quick buck and trying to do the same to the public.
Holmes made one single promise on which she couldn't (possibly) deliver while
Musk makes dozens of promises and delivers well enough on enough of them that he'll never be fully discredited.
The whole "stepping on a single nail vs. sleeping on a bed of nails" metaphor.
I'm having trouble following the metaphor. You seem to be saying that it's a... I guess "unfortunate coincidence" that Musk has had a handful of successful (well, outrageously successful) projects, because it makes exposing him as a fraud for the unsuccessful stuff difficult? But... isn't success the goal here and not punishing fraud?
Would the world really be a better place if we viewed every failure as disqualifying?
That's not the question. The question is "would the world really be a better place if we viewed malicious lies as disqualifying", and I believe the answer is yes.
Which malicious lies are we talking about here? I'm still having trouble following.
The dude makes over-optimistic predictions and shitposts like crazy; we're hardly talking about Pol Pot here. The same personality holds for, what, 90% of Reddit? Maybe only 40% of the HN commenter base (we're cultured!). People hate Musk because Musk makes it so fun to hate him. And that's fine. But it leads to some pretty weird places if you let it (like "The world would be better off without Tesla or SpaceX" being discussed here).
Musk-hatred as a pop ideology is certainly one of the weirder ones. It's a baffling hybrid of conspiracy theorist, self-serving gatekeeping of engineering licensure, not-invented here extremism, technology "realism," billionaire rage/envy, angry politics, and a need to feel superior to the engineers who work at the Musk companies. Altogether, not a look becoming someone who is on a web site devoted to technology and innovation.
Look, it's fine if you don't like the guy or his companies. But some of the ridiculous talking points listed elsewhere in this thread are unhinged.
Talked to a number of engineers leaving Tesla and SpaceX. All complained about harsh working conditions and low pay supposedly made up for by "inspiring" mission.
And once that effect of the worthwhile mission wears off, people seem to run away. Not walk. Run.
In other words, I don't think "Musk-hatred" is an ideology.
Of course that means that Musk's contribution is in fact not so much different from your average business blowhard. "Inspiring". Musk is just better at it, although a significant portion of it is simply in the mission itself, not musk. His nerd look and talk is entirely manufactured and an act (it's fake, as opposed to Larry Page. His nerd act is not an act, a fact he spent millions trying to get away from)
Both companies were effectively started by engineers, not by Elon Musk. There are no real technical accomplishments that are his doing.
I would say he has a good bullshit filter ... but there's a hyperloop in there, along with the boring company. Ahem.
I think the world would be a better place if Elon Musk didn't recklessly claim that currently extant Teslas will achieve full self-driving capability in any reasonable timeframe. Similarly, it would be wonderful if he didn't promote horse shit like the hyperloop and his boring company, possibly with the ulterior motive of undermining actual infrastructure projects
Musk gets the timing wrong almost every time. But he has by and large delivered, on crazy difficult stuff. The guy is a straight up genius, even if his behavior is a little weird.
Building a large profitable car company is genius level. It's crazy difficult, most people thought it was impossible to compete against the scale the big existing players had.
You might be surprised to learn Musk isn't the only employee of Tesla. Most of Tesla's profits the past decade have been carbon credits and not their cars. Like SpaceX the hard work is done by other people while Elon tweets like a 12 year old girl.
If it's that easy everyone would do it - just hire some people and write some tweets. There are 10's/100's of billions laying around on the floor for people who can create large profitable companies.
And if there is billions of easy money to be made in carbon credits everyone would be doing that too.
It's crazy difficult to do what he's done. That's why there are so few companies worth so much money.
Pretty casual with the word genius there. He's an emerald mine scion who lucked out in the dot-bomb era and apparently has a talent for working through hardware manufacturing issues.
None of his original ideas have been successful. Tesla and SpaceX were not originally his, and SpaceX arguably owes more to Shotwell and government money than Musk.
There are so many people in Silicon Valley who would be more effective users of billions of dollars than Musk. Such a waste.
Do you have any specific examples of his genius that allowed him to defy the giant competitors?
Or maybe the existing / new Tesla folks did a lot of the work, like the founders that were ousted by him, but didn’t really get the credit, because Musk wants to be seen as this genius Tony Stark type of inventor.
And dont you think being at the right time and place had something to do with with Teslas initial success, ie the other car manufacturers didn’t really focus or push EVs and Musk had a good marketing idea to place EVs as one solution to combat climate change (yet he actively tried to derail a high speed rail project, which tells me he doesn’t really care about climate change).
When I hear the word genius… I think of Einstein, Newton or Hawking… ppl who use their creative mind and imagination to introduce something completely new and paradigm shifting to the world.
I don’t think that’s what he has done. He used his money to invest in existing ideas and help accelerate them, by using his audience building and marketing skills… so yes he deserves credit for that.
But I would like to be proven wrong, hence why I’d like to know about concrete examples which you think classify Elon as a genius.
Can you share what you think could happen with Musk?
I know he’s polarizing, but he deserves a large amount of credit for Tesla’s success making ev’s mainstream and SpaceX’s success creating reusable rockets. These are certainly up there as major accomplishments from corporate America in the past 20 years (longer most likely).
Tesla’s market cap may get cut by 80% at some point to be more in line with auto manufacturers; SpaceX may eventually have other competition; and if he’s forced to go through with Twitter it might cause financial and reputational harm to him, but is there anything like Holmes on the horizon?
I’m no fanboy of Musk, but even his harshest critics have to acknowledge that his business successes are real and meaningful (assuming you believe any business successes can be meaningful).
Ps yes, he does seem like a jerk a lot of the times, but that’s different than being a fraud.
Somebody doing real things some of the time doesn't preclude them scamming other times. And vice versa, somebody scamming some of the time doesn't necessarily mean everything they does is a scam.
Basically, the rockets being real doesn't prove that FSD isn't a scam. And FSD being a scam doesn't prove the rockets aren't real.
Agree. My intent wasn’t to suggest otherwise. I was trying to give more depth to my question of what the parent could mean when they said Musk’s number may come up.
On the topic of FSD, I think that could be a fair answer for “why is Musk a fraud?” but that would require a follow up question: is FSD fraudulent, like the people working on it inside Tesla, or maybe just Elon, know it won’t ever work and are lying when they say it will? If yes that seems like fraud and therefore the parent comment would end up being right about Elon’s number. But if he genuinely believes they’re going to get there and they’re wrong about the timing? That’s not fraud in the legal sense, is it? If he’s constantly wrong about the timing?
It could be unethical to keep on saying it’ll be here soon and not delivering, and based on some of his behavior you can certainly make the case he may be unethical, but I guess I think the bar for being a fraud or even called a fraud is or ought to be higher (like Theranos or Nikola or Enron or MCI, the list goes on).
Shouldn't it at least have to work well within the lifetime of the cars they sold with it (first in 2016)? If they refund with interest everyone including people who sold it will be less of a retail scam, but still an investor scam.
> is FSD fraudulent, like the people working on it inside Tesla, or maybe just Elon, know it won’t ever work
They must know it would never have worked in the timeline they gave for it. Elon Musk got on stage and told people it would be fiscally irresponsible not to buy his cars because his cars would earn passive income as robo-taxis. There was simply no way that was going to happen and most people who weren't fanboys already thought it a risible claim. They aren't even close to level 5 and they knew it. Years later and they still aren't close to it.
Now, could you prove in court this was fraud and not just moronic optimism? Maybe, maybe not. That probably depends on what they were foolish enough to put in writing where legal discovery might find it. But personally I don't see a shred of reasonable doubt; it was fraud plain and simple. He knew these claims were bullshit but knew self driving cars were hype so he shamelessly exploited that hype to sell cars.
> That’s not fraud in the legal sense, is it? If he’s constantly wrong about the timing?
There is fraud in the legal sense and the colloquial sense. If I describe myself as a genius programmer, but am actually quite below average, I'm probably not legally on the hook for fraud, but me peers might call my one.
Similarly if you continually claim year after year that full self driving is a year away your either clueless about how long it'll take and how difficult a problem it is, while also being too clueless to realize how clueless you are (despite being so consistently wrong), and a colloquial fraud, or you know darn good and well that your claims are wrong and are just putting them out there to boost your stock price (potentially legal fraud).
Fake quartz solar shingles with to bail out his cousin's and his solar company (that also was rescued by SpaceX using NASA funds to invest in trash bonds that had to be bailed out by doing the acquisition).
> It's never going to wear out. It's made of quartz. It has a quasi-infinite lifetime
Musk doesnt deserve credit for the success of Tesla, if you mean actually providing any leadership or technical skills. I do not work there so obviously I dont know internal details but everything we know points to him not making any contributions besides being an obnoxious taskmaster who wanted employees to work late.
He does credit for being such a charismatic charlatan and somehow managing to fool most of the world and being a social media and tech darling based on nothing but lies and empty promises. Tesla's valuation comes from a large part from Musks constant lies that FSD was a solved problem and was just around the corner, every ear since 2016. Every time he said that, he got more fanatics, and the stock surged.
SpaceX is almost fully funded by DoD and Musk has acknowledged the end goal is to use it for military purposes.
All his other ideas like Hyperloop/Boring company, the recently released private tweets with his billionaire friends, getting fired by his own board, clearly expose him as someone who doesn't really understand technology let alone be a 'genius'. More like an idiot.
He was born rich, got lucky and somehow people buy into his myth.
And yes, he is a fraud. He's been selling vaporware for close to a decade, charging for alpha code that kills people and lying about it. Its not the same level of fraud as Holmes but Musk was never honest about it either.
Not true, Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs get credit for what they built without this kind of commentary. Primarily because people don't detect immense amounts of fraud in how they operate(d), they actually built and delivered what they promised investors and consumers.
Maybe it's just a case of what he is doing is a dramatically more difficult and challenging than what the majority of us can remotely understand. And that would mean things don't go the way he planned a significant amount of the time (perfectly normal).
And that includes the whole spectrum of business operations -> investors, funding/finance, marketing, technology, distribution, supply chains etc.
I know from the comfort of our desk chair (with no risk taken, no relevant experience, no nothing really) and with perfect 20/20 hindsight we can make these criticisms but really they dont mean much.
So you are comparing 3 very different businesses, particularly in terms of market size and economics of distribution.
I'm going to assume you lack the background and expertise to make any meaningful assessment of these businesses in the general sense, let alone with regard to specific challenges they each faced.
And even if true, the opposite of under-promising and over-delivering is not "immense amounts of fraud".
Nobody cares about the potential. People only care about a CEO as the person who signs off quality of life.
Musk has barely signed off anything, he's constantly postponing the moment when he'll sign off quality of life, but he's getting paid right now.
Today has been a slow day and I used the various different flavors of Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft so many times. They might not be a colony on Mars, but at least they are real.
Not really the point of the comment above whether Musk has done some good things or not. Specifically, he has literally lied about what Tesla is able to do. That's why his number would come up. He has knowingly said things he knew to be untrue.
Equating Musk with Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos investigation is completely unhinged and speaks more about your ideological preferences than anything else.
If you look at Musk's career and public activity and conclude that the only way to believe that some reporter might get the goods on him in a way that radically changes his public perception is by ideologically motivated reasoning, then I don't think you're being nearly as dispassionate and rational as you believe. This is a man who regularly throws public tantrums and picks really petty fights against anyone who tries to hold remotely accountable (eg, harassing the rescue diver who called out his publicity stunt, or trying to get the ex-SEC lawyer fired from his private sector job with zero provocation). He's shown that he's willing to act impulsively and inappropriately if he feels slighted. Is it so hard to imagine that he crossed some serious boundaries, or will in the future? If we enter a recession and funding gets tight, have you absolute confidence that Musk wouldn't lie to investors to secure funding, and perhaps end up facing the same charges as Holmes? What could this man, a stranger to you I presume, have possibly done to earn that trust? I doubt his board members and major investors would take that on faith.
I've actually never heard someone make an informed analysis about a topic, and then spend their breath deriding people with different views. I believe when people have conviction in their analysis, they generally feel secure presenting it and letting it stand on it's own.
But the folks who want to rationalize their beliefs need to constantly tell you about how factual and logical they are, and how the people who disagree with them are the opposite.
Fair enough, that is indeed a counterexample. I'd suggest that as a general rule it's still the case, but that part of my comment was probably better left unsaid anyhow.
In what sense? We can always use more brilliant mathematicians and scientists, but I'd imagine if they put their energy into understanding their different perspectives and exploring calculus and notation together, they could have achieved even more.
you might imagine it, but it's a bit ridiculous to suggest that you can just pick a different branch from a choose your own adventure book that you think sounds rosier.
People are people. The decisions those people made throughout their lives, that led to the behaviour that we might lament, are also the decisions that led to their world-changing discoveries.
It's a bit out of turn to call what I'm saying ridiculous and imply that I'm employing some kind of fairytale reasoning and not offer any evidence other than your own opinion. You're free to disagree but your opening is writing checks that the body of your argument is not able to cash here.
I don't see how a "rivalry" that destroyed Libniz' career was useful; the discoveries you're celebrating had already been made. Rivalry may have value, though in my mind it remains to be seen, but backstabbing certainly doesn't.
Before the curtain came down on Holmes, she was heralded as a peer of Musk in the press. Obviously, right now Musk appears successful, so equating them is indeed not valid as you point out. But in my defense, I wasn't equating them, just saying that I anticipate Musk's undoing will be as insane to see. I will agree that Musk has successes point to though whereas Holmes first was nowhere to be seen.
To be honest, I'm just happy I got people in this thread to refer to him as Musk. People who say 'Elon' drive me nuts. Don't get me started on 'Steve' either.
I love some of the crazy stuff[1] that happened inside Theranos in response to Carreyrou's reporting.
> Theranos employees once reportedly chanted, “Fuck you, Carreyrou,” at an all-hands meeting in October of 2015.
> At a company party, Theranos employees played a video game modeled after Atari's Space Invaders: The gun was the miniLab, the bullets the nanotainers and the invader being shot at: Yours Truly!
I know it's fashionable to hate the press, but when it escalates to this level of vitriol it smells of "The lady doth protest too much".
I think this is more of an indictment of the rest of journalism than Theranos. He was swimming against all other journalists who were raving about Elizabeth Holmes. How could you not!? She is charismatic, a woman, and young MIT dropout.
We need more journalists like John. There is a shortage of journalists that would stand up for facts even if that meant going against the whole world.
I feel like Carreyrou was the first to popularize that there was something up with Theranos and Holmes. Being a journalist he also did it with direct sources. But the feeling that something was "wrong" predates him by a while, there's some really insightful comments here on HN circa 2013-2014 that seem to smell fishiness. Some of the comments back then point very specifically to the weirdness of her board and the near impossibility of the tech.
It seemed to tick up really sharply in late 2015, which seems to be when Carreyrou decided to pick up the story. This started coinciding with Holmes going on publicity tours talking about new partnerships she had brokered with various pharmacies and other companies. I don't really think it hit the general public consciousness until mid 2016 when the wheels really started coming off. By then Carreyrou really just seemed to be a public face for a lot of people who had more or less figured it out -- except he was really trying to get at the bottom of the "why" it felt bad.
Nope, Carreyrou was on it before it was public that Carreyrou was on it. He spent months talking to people privately. Read the book. There is so much amiss here.
Edit, responding to comment below: Of course people inside Theranos knew about something fishy, a few people outside were rumouring about it. But the suggestion that Carreyrou "jumped" on it in 2015 is false. Completely.
> Nope, Carreyrou was on it before it was public that Carreyrou was on it.
This doesn't preclude other people independently suspecting something was wrong. Indeed, many of the people Carreyrou talked to thought something smelled fishy. People in the original HN threads thought so too, as did Phyllis Gartner.
He should get credit for investigating and building a story around it. But there were calls from the scientific community, and in discussions here on HN, for Theranos to open up and show their data, way before he started investigating. The fact that Silicon Valley VCs, with one notable exception, passed on investing, speaks for itself.
I mean... I feel like this has been done to death. Way back when Holmes was at Stanford she proposed stuff similar to what she was doing to Phyllis Gardner (a respected professor at Stanford) and Gardner's response was basically "what you're proposing is not phsyically possible." The second half of Ken's statement is the real meat of this: he was skeptical, but John produced the goods. And that's the crux of it.
It's one thing to say "Hey, this self-driving car thing seems a bit far-fetched." It's quite a different thing to get the engineers working on it to admit that the facts are untrue. (Not saying that's the case, just a likely example).
> “John Carreyrou did a brilliant job of exposing Elizabeth Holmes — I did not.” Auletta reflected. “So, when I look back on that, yeah, I did a profile of her, but I did not produce the goods that he did.”
Their piece [1] is pretty skeptical of Theranos. All of Theranos claims are quoted as claims, not fact. The article explicitly says Theranos doesn't say how they are achieving what they want, details a lack of independent evidence in support of their claims and quotes competitors explaining problems in Theranos' claims. He makes it clear that Holmes was a charismatic "big claims" type person.
He didn't blow the case open, but reported on it as well as he could have, given libel laws.
"First ethical rule: If you see fraud and do not say fraud, you are a fraud.", then again the guy that coined that saying has been taking paid speaking gigs to promote a conman pretending to be Bitcoin's creator so ... ::SHRUGS::
> "First ethical rule: If you see fraud and do not say fraud, you are a fraud."
Maybe for a journalist with an organization backing them (paying the legal expenses), but generally speaking people aren't ethically obliged to pick legal fights with those richer and more powerful than them.
In the sense that no one is pretty much ever obligated to come to the aid of another legally, sure. But ethically? I'm less sure about about that.
The willingness of people to do the right thing at their own risk for the benefit of others is part of what makes civilization work.
And if your failure to remark might be seen by others as approval, then I think it can rise to an ethical obligation. If you become known for being competent about anything in particular it can be hard to avoid situations where you silence isn't seen as approval.
Any system of ethics which obliges you to disregard your own wellbeing is a death cult. Are you ethically obliged to throw yourself in front of a trolley to save several other people? If you think so, you've been indoctrinated into a death cult.
Come on. I hope you don't think that not failing to call out nonsense when your inaction will make other people get defrauded is the same as literally being killed by a trolley.
Why even reply on HN? It may be adverse to your wellbeing in the future, and doesn't confer any particular benefit to you today.
Fighting petty people that are much wealthier than you can run your life nearly as thoroughly. I'm fascinated when people skip understanding the analogy but argue anyway.
I am of the view that people claiming others have an ethical obligation to report these things are making this claim from a position of safety that is not shared by the person they are advising.
But surely you would agree one is obligated to write an uncritical puff piece about someone they suspect is a fraud? -- they could say nothing instead.
Suspecting someone is a fraud is one thing. Implying someone is a fraud in print without clear evidence is another, and it is typically followed up on with at least a threatening letter on corporate lawyer letterhead.
Maybe they could've written another piece. I'm sure they invested a fair bit of time into learning what they did to write the piece they had.
At any rate, none of that matters. The ancestor post that matters was:
> "First ethical rule: If you see fraud and do not say fraud, you are a fraud."
I disagree with that statement for all of the reasons I have mentioned. In fact, all I did was point out that you were being obtuse, either intentionally or otherwise, because you couldn't make the analogy-leap from "death by trolley" to "your life is now only about this lawsuit and all of your other interests must be ignored for 6-14 months".
> So, just so I get this right: you and MichaelCollins are of the view that anyone who criticizes a corporation is a member of a "death cult"?
No. Those are the words of another commenter. My thinking that it's laughable that people pretend they don't know how analogies work does not logically imply that I share the views of the person that happened to encourage you to demonstrate it.
Anyway, I think he's conceptually right. I wouldn't use the phrase "death cult." Not because there's anything wrong with it - it's just not in my regular vernacular.
What does this mean in practice? Who would I "say fraud" to? I see frauds every day, "crypto" being the most obvious one that won't get me into much trouble. What do I do about it? How much of my time should I devote to the cause? What if I think other more politicized things are frauds? How do I take up that cause at all? Unless you witness a murder or something, "saying something" is not cut and dried, certainly not with respect to something like theranos. That took a court case to prove, and a concerted investigative effort to build into a convincing narrative. Should everyone that had reservations or felt Theranos was a bit or a scam dropped everything and gone John Caryrou on them?
The fine article is about a journalist who wrote and published a profile piece and encountered red flags which they did not mention in the published work.
Fake it until you make it has long been the ethos of SV startups, where in the dust people lose money and jobs. Theranos took this a step further and actively harmed people's health, giving invalid cancer diagnoses for example. She should be in jail for a long time for what she did to people.
Every company has disgruntled employees but I guess they were all paid too well to say something. It seems like a code of silence existed like the mob.
From the interviews I've listened to it seems like people were given the impression that the mission of the company was sincere, and that Holmes was gifted at making people feel as if their concerns had been heard and making them feel like the company would be an eventual success.
The film Fyre Fraud might interest you. The subjects discuss how they felt pressured to "make it work" at Fyre Festival (a different fraud) even as they understood the window of possibility was rapidly diminishing.
Here's my theory: Elizabeth was charged with Investor Fraud - which probably means she told investors "here is a product that is awesome"
The employees knew they had the product and had various vantage points about how well it worked - but none of them knew what promises Elizabeth was making or how poorly the entire product performed
From the book, a few were in the know. One died, and the others were cowed into submission by aggressive threatening attornies . But some thankfully blew the whistle
The last who knew the most were the executives, the top two of which were just convicted
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In case anyone else was having an issue
> He won the Pulitzer Prize twice and is well known for having exposed the fraudulent practices of the multibillion-dollar blood-testing company Theranos in a series of articles published in The Wall Street Journal.
Highly recommend reading his book that gives a detailed account on how he went about taking on Theranos: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/37976541-bad-blood
And it likely is happening again, someone who is being heralded now will be exposed and we'll go through this important exercise again. My money is on Musk's number coming up.
It is a pity that charlatanry seems so profitable of late. It's always been around and in some respects you can admire a con artist's cleverness, but to me there's a difference between fleecing some investors looking to make a quick buck and trying to do the same to the public.
The whole "stepping on a single nail vs. sleeping on a bed of nails" metaphor.
Would the world really be a better place if we viewed every failure as disqualifying?
The dude makes over-optimistic predictions and shitposts like crazy; we're hardly talking about Pol Pot here. The same personality holds for, what, 90% of Reddit? Maybe only 40% of the HN commenter base (we're cultured!). People hate Musk because Musk makes it so fun to hate him. And that's fine. But it leads to some pretty weird places if you let it (like "The world would be better off without Tesla or SpaceX" being discussed here).
Look, it's fine if you don't like the guy or his companies. But some of the ridiculous talking points listed elsewhere in this thread are unhinged.
And once that effect of the worthwhile mission wears off, people seem to run away. Not walk. Run.
In other words, I don't think "Musk-hatred" is an ideology.
Of course that means that Musk's contribution is in fact not so much different from your average business blowhard. "Inspiring". Musk is just better at it, although a significant portion of it is simply in the mission itself, not musk. His nerd look and talk is entirely manufactured and an act (it's fake, as opposed to Larry Page. His nerd act is not an act, a fact he spent millions trying to get away from)
Both companies were effectively started by engineers, not by Elon Musk. There are no real technical accomplishments that are his doing.
I would say he has a good bullshit filter ... but there's a hyperloop in there, along with the boring company. Ahem.
I've never seen anything genius level out of Musk. He likes to think he's a genius and he's not dumb but actually genius? No.
And if there is billions of easy money to be made in carbon credits everyone would be doing that too.
It's crazy difficult to do what he's done. That's why there are so few companies worth so much money.
None of his original ideas have been successful. Tesla and SpaceX were not originally his, and SpaceX arguably owes more to Shotwell and government money than Musk.
There are so many people in Silicon Valley who would be more effective users of billions of dollars than Musk. Such a waste.
"a talent for working through hardware manufacturing issues" can be genius depending on exactly how good one is.
Did he provide any groundbreaking designs himself?
Or are you referring to his salesmanship skills?
Or maybe the existing / new Tesla folks did a lot of the work, like the founders that were ousted by him, but didn’t really get the credit, because Musk wants to be seen as this genius Tony Stark type of inventor.
And dont you think being at the right time and place had something to do with with Teslas initial success, ie the other car manufacturers didn’t really focus or push EVs and Musk had a good marketing idea to place EVs as one solution to combat climate change (yet he actively tried to derail a high speed rail project, which tells me he doesn’t really care about climate change).
When I hear the word genius… I think of Einstein, Newton or Hawking… ppl who use their creative mind and imagination to introduce something completely new and paradigm shifting to the world.
I don’t think that’s what he has done. He used his money to invest in existing ideas and help accelerate them, by using his audience building and marketing skills… so yes he deserves credit for that.
But I would like to be proven wrong, hence why I’d like to know about concrete examples which you think classify Elon as a genius.
I know he’s polarizing, but he deserves a large amount of credit for Tesla’s success making ev’s mainstream and SpaceX’s success creating reusable rockets. These are certainly up there as major accomplishments from corporate America in the past 20 years (longer most likely).
Tesla’s market cap may get cut by 80% at some point to be more in line with auto manufacturers; SpaceX may eventually have other competition; and if he’s forced to go through with Twitter it might cause financial and reputational harm to him, but is there anything like Holmes on the horizon?
I’m no fanboy of Musk, but even his harshest critics have to acknowledge that his business successes are real and meaningful (assuming you believe any business successes can be meaningful).
Ps yes, he does seem like a jerk a lot of the times, but that’s different than being a fraud.
Basically, the rockets being real doesn't prove that FSD isn't a scam. And FSD being a scam doesn't prove the rockets aren't real.
On the topic of FSD, I think that could be a fair answer for “why is Musk a fraud?” but that would require a follow up question: is FSD fraudulent, like the people working on it inside Tesla, or maybe just Elon, know it won’t ever work and are lying when they say it will? If yes that seems like fraud and therefore the parent comment would end up being right about Elon’s number. But if he genuinely believes they’re going to get there and they’re wrong about the timing? That’s not fraud in the legal sense, is it? If he’s constantly wrong about the timing?
It could be unethical to keep on saying it’ll be here soon and not delivering, and based on some of his behavior you can certainly make the case he may be unethical, but I guess I think the bar for being a fraud or even called a fraud is or ought to be higher (like Theranos or Nikola or Enron or MCI, the list goes on).
They must know it would never have worked in the timeline they gave for it. Elon Musk got on stage and told people it would be fiscally irresponsible not to buy his cars because his cars would earn passive income as robo-taxis. There was simply no way that was going to happen and most people who weren't fanboys already thought it a risible claim. They aren't even close to level 5 and they knew it. Years later and they still aren't close to it.
Now, could you prove in court this was fraud and not just moronic optimism? Maybe, maybe not. That probably depends on what they were foolish enough to put in writing where legal discovery might find it. But personally I don't see a shred of reasonable doubt; it was fraud plain and simple. He knew these claims were bullshit but knew self driving cars were hype so he shamelessly exploited that hype to sell cars.
There is fraud in the legal sense and the colloquial sense. If I describe myself as a genius programmer, but am actually quite below average, I'm probably not legally on the hook for fraud, but me peers might call my one.
Similarly if you continually claim year after year that full self driving is a year away your either clueless about how long it'll take and how difficult a problem it is, while also being too clueless to realize how clueless you are (despite being so consistently wrong), and a colloquial fraud, or you know darn good and well that your claims are wrong and are just putting them out there to boost your stock price (potentially legal fraud).
> It's never going to wear out. It's made of quartz. It has a quasi-infinite lifetime
He does credit for being such a charismatic charlatan and somehow managing to fool most of the world and being a social media and tech darling based on nothing but lies and empty promises. Tesla's valuation comes from a large part from Musks constant lies that FSD was a solved problem and was just around the corner, every ear since 2016. Every time he said that, he got more fanatics, and the stock surged.
SpaceX is almost fully funded by DoD and Musk has acknowledged the end goal is to use it for military purposes.
All his other ideas like Hyperloop/Boring company, the recently released private tweets with his billionaire friends, getting fired by his own board, clearly expose him as someone who doesn't really understand technology let alone be a 'genius'. More like an idiot.
He was born rich, got lucky and somehow people buy into his myth.
And yes, he is a fraud. He's been selling vaporware for close to a decade, charging for alpha code that kills people and lying about it. Its not the same level of fraud as Holmes but Musk was never honest about it either.
Interesting, my Tesla feels pretty real.
There are also claims of games being played with Tesla options at the direction of Elon, though that area is less clear to me.
Maybe it's just a case of what he is doing is a dramatically more difficult and challenging than what the majority of us can remotely understand. And that would mean things don't go the way he planned a significant amount of the time (perfectly normal). And that includes the whole spectrum of business operations -> investors, funding/finance, marketing, technology, distribution, supply chains etc.
I know from the comfort of our desk chair (with no risk taken, no relevant experience, no nothing really) and with perfect 20/20 hindsight we can make these criticisms but really they dont mean much.
Jobs and Bezos fell into this category, they just underpromised and overdelivered, not the opposite.
I'm going to assume you lack the background and expertise to make any meaningful assessment of these businesses in the general sense, let alone with regard to specific challenges they each faced.
And even if true, the opposite of under-promising and over-delivering is not "immense amounts of fraud".
Musk has barely signed off anything, he's constantly postponing the moment when he'll sign off quality of life, but he's getting paid right now.
Today has been a slow day and I used the various different flavors of Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft so many times. They might not be a colony on Mars, but at least they are real.
Equating Musk with Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos investigation is completely unhinged and speaks more about your ideological preferences than anything else.
I've actually never heard someone make an informed analysis about a topic, and then spend their breath deriding people with different views. I believe when people have conviction in their analysis, they generally feel secure presenting it and letting it stand on it's own.
But the folks who want to rationalize their beliefs need to constantly tell you about how factual and logical they are, and how the people who disagree with them are the opposite.
Newton / Leibniz would like a word
People are people. The decisions those people made throughout their lives, that led to the behaviour that we might lament, are also the decisions that led to their world-changing discoveries.
Rivalry has value.
I don't see how a "rivalry" that destroyed Libniz' career was useful; the discoveries you're celebrating had already been made. Rivalry may have value, though in my mind it remains to be seen, but backstabbing certainly doesn't.
> Theranos employees once reportedly chanted, “Fuck you, Carreyrou,” at an all-hands meeting in October of 2015.
> At a company party, Theranos employees played a video game modeled after Atari's Space Invaders: The gun was the miniLab, the bullets the nanotainers and the invader being shot at: Yours Truly!
I know it's fashionable to hate the press, but when it escalates to this level of vitriol it smells of "The lady doth protest too much".
[1] https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2018/4/13/17234844/theranos-sp...
We need more journalists like John. There is a shortage of journalists that would stand up for facts even if that meant going against the whole world.
It seemed to tick up really sharply in late 2015, which seems to be when Carreyrou decided to pick up the story. This started coinciding with Holmes going on publicity tours talking about new partnerships she had brokered with various pharmacies and other companies. I don't really think it hit the general public consciousness until mid 2016 when the wheels really started coming off. By then Carreyrou really just seemed to be a public face for a lot of people who had more or less figured it out -- except he was really trying to get at the bottom of the "why" it felt bad.
Edit, responding to comment below: Of course people inside Theranos knew about something fishy, a few people outside were rumouring about it. But the suggestion that Carreyrou "jumped" on it in 2015 is false. Completely.
This doesn't preclude other people independently suspecting something was wrong. Indeed, many of the people Carreyrou talked to thought something smelled fishy. People in the original HN threads thought so too, as did Phyllis Gartner.
It's one thing to say "Hey, this self-driving car thing seems a bit far-fetched." It's quite a different thing to get the engineers working on it to admit that the facts are untrue. (Not saying that's the case, just a likely example).
If not, they failed as a journalist, and then to try to bring this up after the fraud was known to get credit is even worse.
> “John Carreyrou did a brilliant job of exposing Elizabeth Holmes — I did not.” Auletta reflected. “So, when I look back on that, yeah, I did a profile of her, but I did not produce the goods that he did.”
He didn't blow the case open, but reported on it as well as he could have, given libel laws.
[1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/12/15/blood-simpler
Maybe for a journalist with an organization backing them (paying the legal expenses), but generally speaking people aren't ethically obliged to pick legal fights with those richer and more powerful than them.
The willingness of people to do the right thing at their own risk for the benefit of others is part of what makes civilization work.
And if your failure to remark might be seen by others as approval, then I think it can rise to an ethical obligation. If you become known for being competent about anything in particular it can be hard to avoid situations where you silence isn't seen as approval.
Why even reply on HN? It may be adverse to your wellbeing in the future, and doesn't confer any particular benefit to you today.
I am of the view that people claiming others have an ethical obligation to report these things are making this claim from a position of safety that is not shared by the person they are advising.
Maybe they could've written another piece. I'm sure they invested a fair bit of time into learning what they did to write the piece they had.
At any rate, none of that matters. The ancestor post that matters was:
> "First ethical rule: If you see fraud and do not say fraud, you are a fraud."
I disagree with that statement for all of the reasons I have mentioned. In fact, all I did was point out that you were being obtuse, either intentionally or otherwise, because you couldn't make the analogy-leap from "death by trolley" to "your life is now only about this lawsuit and all of your other interests must be ignored for 6-14 months".
> So, just so I get this right: you and MichaelCollins are of the view that anyone who criticizes a corporation is a member of a "death cult"?
No. Those are the words of another commenter. My thinking that it's laughable that people pretend they don't know how analogies work does not logically imply that I share the views of the person that happened to encourage you to demonstrate it.
Anyway, I think he's conceptually right. I wouldn't use the phrase "death cult." Not because there's anything wrong with it - it's just not in my regular vernacular.
The film Fyre Fraud might interest you. The subjects discuss how they felt pressured to "make it work" at Fyre Festival (a different fraud) even as they understood the window of possibility was rapidly diminishing.
The employees knew they had the product and had various vantage points about how well it worked - but none of them knew what promises Elizabeth was making or how poorly the entire product performed
The last who knew the most were the executives, the top two of which were just convicted