> All the future projects are basically smoke and mirrors.
So were electric vehicles when he took over as CEO. In fact, that's why he ended up taking over as CEO — Tesla needed someone who could sell smoke and mirrors for long enough to do a "fake it 'til you make it" run with the entire brand, as they needed to have the cars to justify the chargers and the chargers to justify the cars.
This doesn't mean he's still the right man for the job once the dull nature of reality becomes more obvious, when EVs become boring and mundane, which is exactly what's happening in that market.
The reason the original CEO was replaced by a guy and another guy and finally Musk is because the cost of Roadster parts was higher than the price of Roadster.
What Tesla needed was someone who is un-naturally good operator: someone who can drive the costs down, motivate the employees to deliver great product at a profit.
That was Musk.
And if you think that's just a given and any CEO can do it: currently Lucid and Rivian are still loosing tons of money on their cars. So does Ford and GM. Not to mention Fisker and few others who went bankrupt in the process.
You can do apples-to-apples comparison of execution of Musk vs. CEO of Lucid or Rivian by looking at "money burn at year N" of company's existence. Lucid and Rivian are still accumulating "money burn".
> The reason the original CEO was replaced by a guy and another guy and finally Musk is because the cost of Roadster parts was higher than the price of Roadster.
Interesting, I had not heard about that aspect.
That ability to see and remove unnecessary costs matches what Musk managed with SpaceX, so I can believe he also has that skillset; but more recently with Tesla (and continuously with Twitter) it's felt like he saw the costs and rejected the idea that any of those things might have value.
This would still make him the wrong person going forward, but for different reasons.
One way in which I think he would continue to bring value to Tesla, is that he can be an excellent showman (which goes with selling smoke and mirrors until the reality catches up), and this makes Tesla models far more iconic than many other more forgettable modern cars. For example, although everything about the Cybertruck screams "unsafe" to me, it also looks cool and nobody's going to confuse it for a different brand of truck.
EVs were ready. The Nissan Leaf was the first successful mass market one.
Rockets that land themselves were talked about since the 60s and prototyped by Lockheed in the 90s as the DC-X. (Search YouTube for some flight tests.) The funding just wasn’t there after the Cold War was over and excitement about space was at a low point.
I’m not taking away from the great accomplishments of the engineers at Tesla and SpaceX. What I’m pointing out is that in both cases Musk was raising money to complete and bring to market things that were already quite proven to be achievable. EVs and vertical landing rockets had been done, just not as well.
Rapid tunneling, FSD, and Neurolink are all things nobody has done or done well. Success rate is much worse in that domain because there is a lot less prior art to draw from and less certainty about a solution.
I think the Roadster predates the Leaf by about 2 years? My memory of the era was mostly people saying how they thought batteries were a dead end and hydrogen was the future, but that may have been marketing rather than engineering doing the speaking.
I think SpaceX is meaningfully different than Tesla; even now, Musk seems to display a substantially different personality with regard to SpaceX vs. everything else — the similarity is the optimism, sure, but in he's a lot more willing to say "this is hard and I will make mistakes".
As for how hard the SpaceX stuff is: all I can do there is look at all the rocket companies and space agencies that were openly laughing at what SpaceX was proposing to do. I think SpaceX is where the market proof is for that, rather than the other way around.
Based on what I've heard from civil engineers and neuroscientists, with regard to TBC and Neuralink they regard him much as the annoying speaker with no self-awareness in https://xkcd.com/793/
FSD sounds like what happens with time estimation for someone new to software engineering projects — you have to take what they say, double the number, and increase to the next highest unit: "1 day" means "2 weeks"; "3 months" means "6 years"; and if someone says "next year" in 2016, pencil 2036 into your diary.
The roadster predates the Leaf but it was very expensive. The Leaf was the first affordable EV and in that they beat Tesla by a couple years.
Anyone laughing at what SpaceX was doing was ignorant of things like the DC-X. I suspect a fair amount of that laughter was actually fear from a moribund industry happy with the status quo rather than actual skepticism that it could be done.
Some skepticism about a company the size and budget of SpaceX being able to do it might have been reasonable. That is probably the most impressive thing. The DC-X was Lockheed.
So were electric vehicles when he took over as CEO. In fact, that's why he ended up taking over as CEO — Tesla needed someone who could sell smoke and mirrors for long enough to do a "fake it 'til you make it" run with the entire brand, as they needed to have the cars to justify the chargers and the chargers to justify the cars.
This doesn't mean he's still the right man for the job once the dull nature of reality becomes more obvious, when EVs become boring and mundane, which is exactly what's happening in that market.