Elon Musk: Con man

Clearly this clown has a roof in the US government.

kvs wrote:Clearly this clown has a roof in the US government.

Thunderf00t is right to point out Elon's shaky past corporate history. I already knew about it. Recently even more information has come out.
For example Elon's father was a mechanical engineer and he had a share in some emerald mines in Africa. It seems Elon used some of his father's money to bootstrap his first business. Unlike his claims that he didn't. I already guessed as much that something had to have happened. How did he get the money to start Zip2 in the first place and rent an office and pay for staff? I still wonder how he convinced Compaq to buy the company but then again Compaq back then was a cesspool of all sorts of corporate shenanigans (try reading about Michael Capellas) so who knows what happened.

But this is typical Silicon Valley founder fare. They fake it until they make it. Try reading about Steve Jobs. Pixar was basically bankrupt when they got the business deal with Disney for several movies which made them hugely valuable. When he went back to Apple after they acquired NeXT Computer he had a major cash injection from Microsoft. Microsoft was being sued by the government as a monopoly and they needed someone else they could point out to claim they weren't a monopoly in the desktop computer market and Apple fit the bill. We have all heard stories about how Microsoft got the deal from IBM to supply MS-DOS for the IBM PC. AMD also regularly gets propped up by Intel for much the same reason.

But what would you rather have? A lawsuit to push Elon into inevitable failure like what happened with Preston Tucker or John DeLorean? That is just the nature of starting a business and trying to crack an existing market with huge barriers to entry. The fact is Tesla did deliver several cars, and they are the leading electric car manufacturer in the world. The fact is SpaceX did deliver the Falcon 9 and Dragon capsule. A lot of it is bullshit and smoke and mirrors. But unlike Theranos, Elon's companies, much like Steve Jobs' did deliver something. It might not have been on time, on cost, or with the desired specs, but things happened and the market changed thanks to them. You can't deliver satellites with vapor. SpaceX dominates the current commercial launch market. Thunderf00t's claim about launch prices not going down to the level claimed is also specious. SpaceX has claimed that it costs them $30 million to launch a refurbished rocket. They can sell it for $50 million and undercut all their competitors, why would they charge even less? The fact is space launch demand is highly inelastic.

The HyperLoop is bullshit as are Elon's claims an electric truck could beat rail. It is physically impossible for a rubber tire vehicle to beat rail. The SolarCity sale to Tesla was a scam and the investors bought into it, because they knew losing Elon as a marketing figure would cost them more. It was as simple as that. When HP bought Compaq with the supposed goal to combine market share to beat Dell, a couple years after the merger both companies combined had less share than HP had when it started. We see this BS happen all the time in Silicon Valley. Remember HP CEO Carly Fiorina? She even wanted to run for US President at one time. Probably one of the worst tech leaders in Silicon Valley ever. Elon is comparatively orders of magnitude better. I think he is the modern day Steve Jobs. And yes, Steve Jobs was also a conman. He's a guy who dropped out of a liberal arts degree and conned his way into working for Atari doing chip board design. Try reading about it.

Elon Musk's "wealth" is a mile wide and an inch deep. Easily the biggest fraud in the history of humanity and that is saying something.

Backman wrote:Elon Musk's "wealth" is a mile wide and an inch deep. Easily the biggest fraud in the history of humanity and that is saying something.

Elon is a con and fraud but not 100% bullshit. I think to a large degree he can thank his later success in life to his relationship with Peter Thiel.
Peter Thiel, now that is a guy with deep connections to the US deep state.
How do you think a company like PayPal wasn't sued into oblivion several times over when in the early days it was widely used to launder money?
Paypal wasn't registered a bank either yet provided what was essentially banking services.

I am not really interested in prosecuting Musk. But what I see on Youtube is a cult of Musk fanbois who swallow all of his
"high tech" BS as if it was real. The amount of vapourware from this clown is incredible. Apple has always pushed actual
products and not fake claims. Even if Apple is not a nice company.

lancelot wrote:

kvs wrote:Clearly this clown has a roof in the US government.

The fact is Tesla did deliver several cars, and they are the leading electric car manufacturer in the world. The fact is SpaceX did deliver the Falcon 9 and Dragon capsule. A lot of it is bullshit and smoke and mirrors. But unlike Theranos, Elon's companies, much like Steve Jobs' did deliver something.

There's no comparison at all between Steve Jobs and subsidy fraud boy Musk. Having a company like Jobs had, that had lean years with cash injections, is no comparison to Tesla.

The bigger Tesla has become, the bigger its cash burn is. Conversely, once Apple got the iPhone going, it expanded with the profits from sales. And became the most profitable corporation in history. Telsa is a ponzi scheme that builds electric cars. Period. Yes it sells cars. You can sell a lot of stuff when you are selling it for less than the cost to make it. Anyone can sell dollars for 75 cents.

kvs wrote:I am not really interested in prosecuting Musk.   But what I see on Youtube is a cult of Musk fanbois who swallow all of his
"high tech" BS as if it was real.   The amount of vapourware from this clown is incredible.   Apple has always pushed actual
products and not fake claims.   Even if Apple is not a nice company.  

I am interested in prosecuting Musk.

Backman wrote:There's no comparison at all between Steve Jobs and subsidy fraud boy Musk. Having a company like Jobs had, that had lean years with cash injections, is no comparison to Tesla.

The bigger Tesla has become, the bigger its cash burn is. Conversely, once Apple got the iPhone going, it expanded with the profits from sales. And became the most profitable corporation in history. Telsa is a ponzi scheme that builds electric cars. Period. Yes it sells cars. You can sell a lot of stuff when you are selling it for less than the cost to make it. Anyone can sell dollars for 75 cents.

The thing is modern Apple as we know it does not manufacture anything. So the vast costs in setting up production plants and things like that are hidden in the balance sheets of their suppliers like Foxconn. A couple years back a sapphire crystal manufacturer sued Apple after they basically bankrupted them. They made them sign an impossible contract and they wasted huge amounts of money to expand capacity only for Apple to pull the plug on it because they did not meet their deadline. They had to ramp production from small watch sized sapphire glass to smartphone screen sapphire glass size. They had to buy loads of huge new crystal growing furnaces and experiment to attempt to increase yield. No cost to Apple, but it is in someone's balance sheet. When Apple did produce computers in the US in their later years before Jobs came back they were not cost competitive and hemorrhaged money. Steve Jobs and Tim Cook basically eliminated that part of the equation by outsourcing production. Apple was already doing a lot of outsourcing prior to that when they moved to the PowerPC architecture but it only accelerated.

Tesla is known to have huge profit margins per vehicle but they are paying for capacity expansion themselves. This is unlike, say, a company like Uber. Now that is a scam almost as bad as WeWork.

Companies like China's BYD and Taiwan's Foxconn seem to want to get into the electric car OEM business. So who knows, maybe they will end up killing Tesla like the Taiwanese OEMs like Foxconn and Quanta killed US computer fabrication a couple decades back. Elon is trying to massively ramp up production in an attempt to corner the market before that happens. There is huge inertia in car customers switching to different brands. So if he can lock up enough clients he could be in a pretty cushy position for probably a decade.

Electric power is great and all except for the claim that it is more efficient than gas.

I see companies in New Zealand are hiring electric diggers which have a 1 and a 1/2 hour efficiency, but require a diesel generator to charge them which takes 8 hours. This is just my 10 cents worth on other ways he is a conman.

If you do the math in terms of fuel efficiency and pollution electric is worth it.
The powertrain is more efficient and the car can use regenerative breaking.
This is particularly relevant in stop and go city traffic.

The cars are still too expensive for mass use though. The battery cost needs to come down a lot.