If you bought one anytime after the initial reviews just what were you doing?
I just can’t imagine there was anyone who both knew it existed and didn’t know it was garbage.
The only reason I can see anyone having bought one at that point is because they wanted to own an interesting little failure in gadget history. And even then just buy one used, there was no point in spending $700.
I recall seeing a glowing article in Axios about the product and I wouldn't be surprised if there were similar posts in other publications. I was pretty skeptical for obvious reasons and expect most people were, but some people will uncritically believe what they read, especially about the hot business topic of the moment.
Getting such articles written in the first place shows some level of business connections. I don't like that people will throw so much money away on hype, especially when so many useful products languish, but it's the world we live in.
Maybe they can hack it to redirect the requests to some little server that can relay their questions to chatgpt. Might be better than Humanes original backend!
the only question is if there were enough sold to build a community like the spotify carthing, which now sell on Ebay for more than their original msrp (not inflation adjusted)
Yep. I mentioned that. And that’s a totally valid reason.
But you knew it was a failure at that point, that’s why you were buying it. You wouldn’t have been expecting it to be a good product for the next couple of years. Otherwise you wouldn’t have been interested.
> And no refunds for purchases made before Nov 15, 2024.
For those with premium credit cards, this is why I suggest always putting electronics on that card. In my experience, the extended warranty coverage kicks in if and when the original merchant is unwilling or unable to cover their initial warranty (as well as for 12 months thereafter); this is clearly a violation of fitness for purpose, so I'd expect zero issue in getting this refunded by the CC folk.
Well his first startup capital would be from his parents that own diamond (blood, not synthetic) mines in South Africa. That's how he and his brother started Zip2. That got bought out and left Musk with an extra $22 million. He then started x.com which, by all accounts of people who worked there, was a total failure. In all ways but one: they were the first federally insured online bank. That's why Confinity (which owned PayPal) bought x.com (and then killed it. Because they only wanted the legal benefits not the product itself). That's when Musk truly became rich
But you're right that government contracts are the way you truly get rich. A lot of people don't realize California's biggest export is airplanes and airplane parts (a business run on gov't contracts) not Silicon Valley. All of Musk's ventures (Tesla, SpaceX, Boring, solar, etc) rely on heavy subsidization/contracts with gov'ts. All of his ventures are some of the most heavily subsidized companies in the US[0] and he's been sued in several countries over subsidy fraud
Yeah, he made his first big money from PayPal (I think around $300M), and then invested most of that money in SpaceX and Tesla, and that's how he became a billionaire.
180m after taxes -> 100m to spacex / 70m to tesla / 10m to solarcity.
remember before the gvt pumped money into his companies they were on the brink of bankruptcy. once they got the nasa contract spacex immediately got profitable. which allowed musk to use spacex money to loan to tesla. n also use the govt loan to tesla to make the save the company.
gist of the story - the money is in gvt. same applies to thiel.
GM’s current annual expenditure on Cruise amounted to about $2 billion, and the restructuring would cut that by more than half, CFO Paul Jacobson said.
