| ▲ | xutopia 4 hours ago |
| I can't comprehend for the life of me that people put their life savings in what Elon Musk is doing. Are people not seeing how he's lying about the future all the time? He said he aimed to have 5000 Optimus robots out by end of 2025, 50000 by 2026 and 10 times that in 2027. He promised in 2015 that full autonomous driving would arrive in 2 years and we aren't there yet 11 years later. He even said in 2016 that there would be coast-to-coast autonomous driving in 2017. He promised manned missions to Mars by 2024-2025 in multiple interviews between 2011 and 2016. He promised in 2016 that there would be solar roofs expansions by 2017 that didn't pan out, he promised AGI by 2025 in 2024. Elon Musk has repeatedly lied about outcomes of his ventures, gotten crazy valuations based on those exaggerations and now people are starting to finally wake up that he isn't as good as his ego. |
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| ▲ | StilesCrisis a minute ago | parent | next [-] |
| Are they waking up? I haven't seen evidence of it yet. |
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| ▲ | crimsonspy 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| He claimed that he would unearth billions of dollars of government fraud, only to lie about that too. Instead his team cut aid programs and have contributed to an estimated 700,000 deaths so far. https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-new-yorker-interview/the-... |
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| ▲ | cyberjerkXX 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | It's crazy to believe that stopping the funding of US backed NGOs directly kills people. Literally just make up bullshit numbers and virtue signal. This is a reason why the US is trillions in debt. We need more than DOGE. We need real cuts to mandatory spending. Otherwise buckle up - they are going to inflate their way out of the debt. | | |
| ▲ | ceejayoz 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > It's crazy to believe that stopping the funding of US backed NGOs directly kills people. Why? Have US-backed NGOs never saved a single life with their spending? You can argue it's not worth the spending, perhaps, but you really can't argue that it's not happening somewhere. > This is a reason why the US is trillions in debt. This is a tiny, tiny, nearly invisible fraction of that reason. | | |
| ▲ | somenameforme an hour ago | parent [-] | | Gotta hit on a few things there in no particular order: - USAID's final budget was $34 billion. That's already very real money, but it came from the discretionary budget - that giant bill of spending where the government decides what to spend money on: schools, roads, housing, and so on. The entire discretionary budget for 2025 was $1.9 trillion, so USAID made up almost 2% of all the US' federal discretionary spending! - Nothing USAID was doing was irreplaceable. The vacuum their exit has created is being rapidly filled by a wide mix of other interests. So saying they are saving a life when they are just another replaceable entity, even if a rather large one, is misleading. It's kind of like saying Google is why we have web browsers. - USAID and the CIA worked hand-in-hand. For instance one project was USAID/CIA starting a fake social media site [1] in Cuba specifically with the goal of trying to create an insurrection, which would undoubtedly be very bloody had they succeeded. So in your calculus you need to account for deaths caused by USAID as well. - Many of their programs seemed geared towards the creation of dependencies rather than working to ensure the self sustainability of various places. I think this likely ties into the above issue. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for life, give a man a fish a day and you now control that man because he's dependent upon you. Sociopathic intelligence agencies blending with philanthropy is a rather horrific combination. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZunZuneo | | |
| ▲ | ceejayoz 18 minutes ago | parent [-] | | > so USAID made up almost 2% of all the US' federal discretionary spending! So, tiny; a fraction of what we spend on much less useful things like the Iran war or huge gifts to ICE. > The vacuum their exit has created is being rapidly filled by a wide mix of other interests. Yeah, we don't really want China vacuuming up all of Africa. It was already looking like a growing problem before the USAID cuts. > So in your calculus you need to account for deaths caused by USAID as well. I mean, your one example cited didn't work and resulted in zero deaths. If we get to count that sort of thing, we'd have to start accounting for the soft power benefits of USAID (and those the CIA gets from the trade), too. Goodwill, intel, not having a bunch of polio infections come into the country via air, etc. > Teach a man to fish and you feed him for life, give a man a fish a day and you now control that man because he's dependent upon you. How does "take their fishing grounds (and other resources) for hundreds of years" figure into the analogy? |
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| ▲ | ink_13 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | If US backed NGOs were distributing life saving medications (e.g. for HIV-AIDS via PEPFAR, to give only one example) and then that distribution was withdrawn, causing recipients to die because they could no longer access medication, what other conclusion should we draw? | |
| ▲ | wredcoll 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Maybe we should have elected Hillary Clinton then? (This is a reference to Bill Clinton's extremely successful "Reinventing Government" initiative which actually balanced the federal budget until the next republican came along...) | |
| ▲ | zzrrt 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > This is a reason why the US is trillions in debt. Trump's OBBBA will be another reason, expected to add several trillion in the next few years. So yeah, real cuts are probably needed, but the DOGE people aren't achieving that in net. |
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| ▲ | tejohnso 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Well, rational or not, anybody that put a significant life savings into early TSLA and kept it there is retirement money rich now. Lots of rational people kept shorting, thinking sanity would prevail, and ended up losing bigly. |
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| ▲ | oooyay 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Salesforce often does product announcements to determine how the market might respond before they ever build anything. The very thing they're selling may not exist and might not even be possible as they describe it. I think it's a way some businesses just do business and the market has not issued a correction to that. Maybe it should? |
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| ▲ | gtowey 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| His success is like the best case study in the world of how our current economic system is solely for the benefit of a privileged few. He is obviously a liar, a conman and morally suspect. But he has mastered the art of lying in a way that people want to believe. So much so that he can separate fools from their money to the tune of billions. When you can do that, every economic institution on the planet wants a piece. It's a firehouse of ill gotten cash, and those supporting his staggering rise to power are there to grab a bit of filthy lucre for themselves. It's a wealth transfer than comes along maybe only a few times in a generation. Everyone knows he's a complete fraud even as they enable him to pull off all these stunts. |
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| ▲ | DustinBrett 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Every company you mentioned has made more progress in those spaces than anyone else, and they are all clear progress towards the goals discussed. |
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| ▲ | xutopia 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | You're mistaken. Name 3 accomplishments he made and I'll show you world class work done elsewhere by other companies. The only thing he did which was notable was Starlink and I'll gladly grant you that. China is about to eat Starlink's lunch with their own tech. Again I think people overestimate Musk's contributions to the world. | | |
| ▲ | laweijfmvo 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 1. Starlink, which you provided 2. Made the modern EV relatively commonplace; no other manufacturer was taking it seriously until Tesla succeeded, and took many years to catch up, although they have 3. Re-usable rockets / higher launch cadence leading to significantly cheaper costs to put things in space. No major competition yet. | |
| ▲ | RealityVoid 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Falcon rockets, starlink, Tesla. They all pushed the envelope in their field. Are the stocks overpriced? Yes. Did they do impressive technical work? Also yes. They might get surpassed by competitors, but that is to be expected for all companies. But they clearly did something special there. And I deff am no Musk fanboy, but you have to give him the credit for establishing those systems. | | |
| ▲ | ge96 13 minutes ago | parent [-] | | I think the fact that China is copying SpaceX's tech is a testament to SpaceX's success There's also the bit about people talking shit about other people they're not even close to, to feel like they matter. Ahh well Hey guys Elon Musk sucks haha high fives all around, great |
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| ▲ | wat10000 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Tesla may not have pioneered fundamental technology, but it put together a combination of price and utility that nobody matched at the time. Find me anything in 2018 like a Model 3 that wasn't a compliance car. Profitably reusable rockets were a major accomplishment. People like to argue against this. Every argument I've seen is either saying it doesn't actually save money or it wasn't new, neither of which is correct. It's very hard to argue with the numbers here; SpaceX is now launching more into orbit than every other launch provider combined. I think the main reason people downplay these things is precisely because his own claims are so exaggerated. Doing 165 orbital launches in a year just doesn't sound impressive when he promised we'd be sending people to Mars years ago. |
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| ▲ | lightedman 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | "Every company you mentioned has made more progress in those spaces than anyone else" Lies. Waymo beats Tesla in FSD. Optimus is nothing while China has full fucking martial arts robots. It's 2026 where's that 2025 manned Mars mission? Where's that 2025 AGI promise (currently running itself in circles.) His solar roof tile idea was a bunk plan and any regular roofer could've told you that. China made a fucking electric car that can KITT jump. The only way Teslas get off the ground is when they hit curbs at batshit insane speeds. Elon and his companies, outside of SpaceX, are generally frauds. Down to PayPal, which thinks it has a right to YOUR MONEY if you even so much as sneeze wrong (theft by contract.) | |
| ▲ | panphora 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | That simply isn't true. Progress toward a goal isn't the same as leading the field. Autonomous driving is the clearest counterexample: by March 2026 Waymo had logged over 220 million rider-only miles with nobody in the driver's seat, and was doing 400,000+ rides per week across six US metros. Tesla's consumer product is still officially "Full Self-Driving (Supervised)," and Tesla itself says it does not make the car autonomous. Mercedes has Level 3 certification. Tesla has none. Optimus missed the stated 5,000 robots in 2025. As of July 2026, Tesla still isn't selling it and is only preparing manufacturing capacity. Meanwhile Agility's Digit is in commercial warehouse deployment today. Solar Roof is worse: Musk targeted 1,000 installations per week, and Wood Mackenzie estimated Tesla averaged about 21 in 2022. Tesla's disputed the number but offered no replacement count. SpaceX is the real exception. It genuinely leads, and the engineering is remarkable. But it's still a decade overdue on "crewed Mars by 2024." That's the point: on the one venture where "more progress than anyone else" is actually true, the promise is still failing by over a decade. The criticism isn't that nothing comes to pass. It's that concrete near term promises repeatedly fail and get replaced by bigger ones. When a valuation depends on being uniquely far ahead, competitors catching up erases that premium fast. |
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| ▲ | blanched 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| From what I can tell, the sad truth is that people think “he’s a billionaire / trillionaire, I want to be involved with that.” It’s a variant of the people who pick “Jay-Z” in the meme question “would you rather have half a million dollars or lunch with Jay-Z?” |
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| ▲ | usefulcat 5 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Like Trump, he excels at self promotion, and a lot of self promotion is about being able to lie fluently. For such people, lying comes as easy as breathing. No wonder they do it all the time. |
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| ▲ | etempleton 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Some people, many people, recognize him as a serial liar/exaggerator, but think he will make them rich too. Eventually that probably stops being true. |
