Approx 1.5 million Tesla customers paid for autonomous self-driving mode, and are still waiting for it. It was promised back in 2014. That say's it all.
Interesting and possibly related: These kind of claims influenced the whole car industry to "catch up." I drove my father's mint 2015 Japanese luxury sedan on a road trip last week, and the automated "safety" features are far from safe. Think unexpectedly hammering on the brakes at 85 mph because someone passed me. My theory is they were trying to launch features that were far from market-ready, because of Tesla's claims.
Jobs was a massive dick and terrible person but he was a transcendent hype man (as in actually good at it, not a mumbling unsocialized man child like Elon) and was actually in on the ground floor as a co-founder of Apple.
As awful as he was, Musk still doesn't stack up to him at all.
Can confirm. Am an engineer in a tech company that gets told what kind of product they want us to design for customers and what minimal features they want and that’s it.
Your statement is very accurate. Though he is stupid enough to through money at things that normally don't have a business case that makes sense.
Falcon 9 program could be considered this as well. Even with re usability the way he has it setup, the only way to make it profitable was to have more than 50 or so launches a year. The business case for that was LEO internet service. Shockingly this worked. This is also why as Starship becomes operational and Starlink launches move from Falcon 9 to Starship, the Falcon 9 is going to be retired. The profit margin isn't there for SpaceX and every corporation I know seems to put profit above serving customers.
He's still a talent parasite and I loathe the man, but someone has to be crazy enough to throw money at something that doesn't have a high profit market business case in order to make change. As much as I loathe the man, I could probably respect him a bit if he wasn't such a fucking creepy ass Neo-natalist Nazi.
Not all parasites provide societal benefits. Then again, I am against absolutes. Only the Sith deal in absolutes. Which is ironically an absolutist statement. Fuck you George Lucas for writing that.
There are definitely some politicians who are the worst kind of parasites. There are some who actually facilitate growth through funding public services. There are some who fund cronyism to help buddies out in both the private and public sector.
Honestly, cronyism tends to be acceptable as long as the public benefits. When the public doesn't benefit or the crony extorts profit through the system, cronyism becomes problematic. Cronyism still tends to be problematic when better service providers are being pushed out. This is what happened between ULA and NASA before SpaceX entered the picture. Wild how this conversation comes full circle.
I don't like them. I just try to recognize costs verses benefits when evaluating anything and everything. I can't stand looking at things as simply black or white. People insist on removing the color from everything when they do that.
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u/benspags94 8h ago
They still believe Elon’s an inventor when he’s more like a professional parasite.