American culture has shifted in the last decade to be extremely critical and scathing towards anyone or anything that attempts to change the status quo - even if it's an attempt to make things better.
See all the negative comments in this thread, for example.
Instead saying "Jeez, this looks interesting. I'm happy some billionaire is trying to fix the horrible traffic problem instead of just buying more McMansions and yatchs. It seems complicated and I'm not sure it will work because of reason x, y and z, but it will be cool to watch!"
The collective American voice is now: "Stupid! Will never work! Waste of time!". (And angrily at that)
It's a real shame, because people who genuinely try to make life better for others are rare, and America needs all of them they can get!
Not just last decade, the 70s were a real pivot point in the American attitude towards technology and science as a large cultural shift towards mistrusting power and the market.
Watching science newsreels from the 40s-60s you notice that they're the epitome of boundless optimism.
Opinion about Elon Musk seems to be polarized in places like HN. Haven't heard of normal people caring substantively about him, certainly not in a way describable as "hating his guts".
It felt a bit persnickety - focusing on some minor details of the event that weren’t perfect, probably as a proxy for author’s larger skepticism. Skepticism is warranted given the big claims & article wasn’t too bad overall.
Some people have a hard time keeping relative and absolutes apart. There are lots of people, even on this site who often claim that he is 'not even an engineer'.
People emotions simply get the better of them in situation that are so public, every little detail gets blown out of proportion in either direction.
The plain fact that he controls and builds multiple US based billion dollar companies seems to get lots AT THE VERY MOMENT when US based manufacturing has been on of the prime political debates is astonishing for me as an outsider.
I'm a Musk fan, but literally 90%+ of the things Musk say never actually happen, or happen very late, or have so radically changed in the process as to be something different. You're just quoting the successes, not all the things that he's claimed to be working on in the history of his career.
I suspect one of the reasons journalists are so unfairly critical of him is that the story keeps changing. As an engineer I know this is because he is adapting to circumstance and the reality is that we ought be thankful that he is showing us early glimpses at all. But a journalist looks at that and says "wtf? if I report on this then it's my credibility on the line when next year it's morphed into something else."
These 'journalists' are the ones who make a choice to comment and report on him. If they want to report news that is known and understood by everybody to be a best case, its their own fault.
Musk is interesting in the first place because he is not a typical boring CEO. So they want to use him as clickbait, but then they get shitty if its not 'polished' like what they get sent from the PR departments of other companies.
You mentioned the $35k Model 3, which I think is the worst since so many deposits were collected on this promise. This spring it will be 3 years since those deposits were collected, including mine (since refunded at about the 2-year anniversary). He also keeps pushing back the timeline for deposit holders. It has been 3-6 months away for over a year now. And there are anecdotes (which I know aren't data) of difficulty lately getting deposits refunded.
FSD (Full Self Driving) option in general is looking like vaporware. I'm wondering if Tesla is going to need to refund the money people paid for that option. It's no longer offered.
It was promised for ~6 weeks, ~6 weeks ago. So that should be out any day now, right?
He was also going to fix Flint's drinking water. To his credit, he recently made a charitable donation instead, but it was originally phrased as engineering help.
It felt completely neutral to me. Admittedly, the reporter didn't genuflect before the altar of Elon, which some of his fans might interpret as implicit hostility.
