Just ask yourself if Tesla cannot be autonomous in their own merely 2 mile long tunnel with only trained teslas drivers how can you believe any other promises ?
Setting a lofty goal and failing is not to be rewarded or congratulated, or in this case compensated .
There are other stuff to do in the world both as far as technological advancement and leisure that could fill that time and man hours and produce a tangible ROI as opposed to "we are failing but at least we are trying"
By the same token the next goal set by Musk would be creating a wormhole if he hasn't said it already considering the amount of drugs that he takes.
Many people conflate the reasoning that is prevalent in SV for founders where they say "there is no price for failure". That is maybe true for the individual not when trillions of man hours and trillions of dollars are allocated.
By your world view no one should do anything because they could fail. Ycombinator shouldn't exist because most of them fail.
They haven't hit your personal standard. Who cares? Investors are happy with their progress and at the end of the day that is more important than people like yourself who probably do t have skin in the game
> > By your world view no one should do anything because they could fail
It is one thing to fail independently say at your own startup, complete different thing is having choose between keeping your job or do something that you feel like it's a dead end or it is deceiving the public even tho you are not convinced just because the higher ups ordered so.
THat's how trillions of dollars and most importantly trillions of man hours are set on fire
When they actually lose money let me know. Right now they're still making billions in profit. If that's your idea of success you must be making tens of billions yourself
When you announce goals and fail them is like when boxers or UFC fighters announcing they'd destroy an opponent or sail easily to win the belt.
When they lose of course people are gonna call them out regardless of the monetary purse that they were awarded for losing the fight.
And that is the way it should be considering you are dangling in front of people a huge improvement in their quality of life and then constantly failing to ship it.
For all its flaws Microsoft shipped Windows 95 after talking about it for 10 months before the launch. Not 10 years. And that was really a big quality of life improvement for basically billions of people.
Finally people don't care about what the marketcap of Tesla is or what Musk net worth is, those discussions happen among the fanboys and those who have false idols. People care about how a company can improve their life and despite all the fanfare, Tesla Motors have produced very little improvment through its history, and thye are not a startup either considering they are 2002-2025
Windows 95 is comically easy compared to most of the stuff that Tesla does.
|People care about how a company can improve their life and despite all the fanfare, Tesla Motors have produced very little improvment through its history,
This is just objectively not true. They produce some of the safest cars in the world, and have the best selling car in the world. Obviously those same people you are talking about disagree with you.
Tesla was founded in 2003, not 2002. Regardless they are still a startup compared to all the other US car manufacturers. Regardless though Tesla has done amazingly well, been very profitable while others are suffering, and despite major cap-ex are able to still make a profit.
> > Windows 95 is comically easy compared to most of the stuff that Tesla does.
Many would not agree but whatever , it was a paradigm shift that changed the world and improved the quality of life of billions of people.
The point of companies is to improve the quality of life of people, not pursue stuff that is hard for virtuoso technical bragging rights. That is something that theoretical physicists do. Actually if something is a low hanging fruit that can improve the quality of life of billions of people that should be pursured not the virtuoso technical mastership for the sake of technical virtuosity
> > This is just objectively not true. They produce some of the safest cars in the world, and have the best selling car in the world. Obviously those same people you are talking about disagree with you.
Put a car from 2003 and a Tesla from 2025 next to each other and they are 99.999% the same. As a matter of fact Tesla can't do many things that a 2003 car can do.
This is the folly of people who think that a product which is 200 year old like the automobile can be revolutionized just because you can convince a bunch of loonies that it became a "tech company"
And you are fixating on technical prowness for technical prowness' sake.
If a start button can improve the life of billions then it should be pursued.
There are many thousands of "start button" alike solution which would improve the life of billions but the capital and the man hours are tied into fixations which are impossible or perpetually 20 years in the future.
Basically everybody who is not reinventing the wheel for political purposes.
Musk history is basically reinventing the wheel to fit political narratives not bona fide consumer need for a paradigm shift
Electric cars (reinventing the wheel to latch onto the left political narrative of climate change)
Twitter (reinventing the wheel to latch onto the right wing political narrative of censorship)
SpaceX (reinventing the wheel to latch onto the right/left political narrative of military domination)
The true paradigm shift that has a chance to change people's lives is AI and LLMs and Musk missed it completely, and spectacularly, like he was informed of everything that was being developed and still decided not to direct resources there up until ChatGPT shook the world, then he jumped on the bandwagon like everybody else who didn't have inside information
Between Waymo and Comma.ai, yes they did. Not in those goofy tunnels, but the underlying tech is there. So then why are the Vegas tunnels not self-driving? Tesla FSD works great in select places right now! How is the tunnel not one of them?
My opinion makes no difference in the scheme of things, but yes, I'd still think it's a waste. There's a monorail. Spend the money on making that suck less instead.
https://youtu.be/VPjODKUxV5g is where I'm coming from. The section of the system, where there's one tunnel, so the previous car has to clear the tunnel before the next vehicle can go, seems particularly stupid.