Thunderf00t has lost last of his marbles and remaining bits of credibility

[Yrouel86]

Most of Thunderfoot's complaints about Musk are for statements which in retrospect were wrong.  Whether they were aspirational and not intended as lies or known to be lies is subject to debate.  It seems that many of Thunderfoot's complaints are subject to the same criticism.  Which then reminds me of a lesson in one of the humanities/management classes that I took.  In which it was pointed out that often the people you most dislike are those most like yourself.

Musk is often way too optimistic but as Dave also said before in this thread that's part of the job of a CEO. And ultimately even if late his companies do deliver.

Thunderf00t is not just wrong on predictions but also on matter of fact, in other words he also just flat out lies.

I made the example of the Tesla Semi already, here's another more recent:



Title and thumbnail text are simply wrong, it's not matter of opinion or just a wrong prediction, it's a blatant lie.

The HLS contract is valued about $4 billion and it's a fixed price milestone based contract which means SpaceX gets paid in tranches upon completion of certain milestones.
The rest of Starship development cost has been covered by SpaceX themselves, initially by raising funds from private investors and lately from their revenue mostly from Starlink (which is extremely ironic in the context of TF bullshit narrative).

Again not a matter of opinion.

[EEVblog]

Like Starlink does pretty good for a 'failure'. Below his own claims for it to break even. 4 years after the video it's 6.6 times more US costumers than what he said was maximum possible for 10k satellites.

Starlink has been a massive success, after not unreasonable doubts at the start.
It won out through meeting an insatiable demand, reasonable pricing, better than expected performance, better than expected scaling, and design and manufacturing excellence (the Starlink factory in the biggest PCB assembly factory in the US).
Of course it really helps that you also own the launch system.
Vertical integration at it's finest.
In fact, is there a better example of vertical integration of such a complex system?

TF will have to eat crow on this one I'm afraid. That being said, I think it's the only debunking that has so far turned out wrong? (others Musk related things are still up in the air)

[EEVblog]

Musk is often way too optimistic but as Dave also said before in this thread that's part of the job of a CEO. And ultimately even if late his companies do deliver.

Deliver can be different from success though.
Solar roof tiles delivered but was an abject failure.
Solar City delivered but was an abject failure.
Boring company hasn't exactly failed, but it's certainly "meh".
Roadster 2.0 never happened, I think the only example of something not delivered?

Tesla cars, Tesla batteries, Starlink, SpaceX, X, and xAI are all standout commercial successes.

Many other things (RoboTaxi, Semi, FSD, Optimus, Neuralink) are still TBD due to "Elon Time".
Although Neuralink has been successful in trials, even impressively so.

[wraper]

TF will have to eat crow on this one I'm afraid. That being said, I think it's the only debunking that has so far turned out wrong? (others Musk related things are still up in the air)

I've seen a long itemized list of failed TF's (smaller) predictions, quite old though. A few of a bit fresher in video form. I could not find an original video of him debunking Falcon 9, maybe it's deleted. Here's a video taking apart TF's debunking of Falcon 9 with snippets of original, though. As you should know, the vast majority of F9 flights were with reused booster, some doing over 30 flights.

[EEVblog]

TF will have to eat crow on this one I'm afraid. That being said, I think it's the only debunking that has so far turned out wrong? (others Musk related things are still up in the air)

I've seen a long itemized list of failed TF's predictions, quite old though. A few of a bit forester videos. I could not find an original video him debunking Falcon 9, maybe it's deleted. Here's a video taking apart TF's debunking of Falcon 9 with snippets of original, though. As you should know, the vast majority of F9 flights were with reused booster, some doing over 30 flights.

I'm not talking about SpaceX related micro-predictions, I'm talking about entire debunkings of products. Name one apart from Starlink that's been completely wrong?

I didn't watch he whole video, but the even the guy in the video admits TF was right, and that he's just ignoring positive aspects. That's not really being wrong? it's more like not appreciating the future potential

[wraper]

I didn't watch he whole video, but the even the guy in the video admits TF was right, and that he's just ignoring positive aspects. That's not really being wrong? it's more like not appreciating the future potential

The only thing that's right is that there is a payload mass penalty. Which rarely is a major limitation of itself. Look Starlink launches, nose cone is packed full. The most ridiculous was TF comparing its reliability with (implied good track record) the Space Shuttle... that killed 14 astronauts (which he of course did not mention). Although TBH it's much more reasonable than stuff he churns out these days.

[Yrouel86]

Musk is often way too optimistic but as Dave also said before in this thread that's part of the job of a CEO. And ultimately even if late his companies do deliver.

Deliver can be different from success though.
Solar roof tiles delivered but was an abject failure.
Solar City delivered but was an abject failure.
Boring company hasn't exactly failed, but it's certainly "meh".
Roadster 2.0 never happened, I think the only example of something not delivered?

Considering that TF generally portrays things to the effect of "not going to happen" (he rarely talks in absolutes like "never" but the message and overall narrative is rather clear) releasing the product in any capacity already proves him wrong.
And yes the Roadster remains the only big thing left to latch on.

Tesla cars, Tesla batteries, Starlink, SpaceX, X, and xAI are all standout commercial successes.

Things also subjected by TF to the same treatment as your previous examples.

Many other things (RoboTaxi, Semi, FSD, Optimus, Neuralink) are still TBD due to "Elon Time".
Although Neuralink has been successful in trials, even impressively so.

I already talked about the Semi ("empty husk") and FSD being used for the Robotaxi is one instance where TF literally said "never going to happen" so as my point above considering the delta between "never" (or an argument to that effect) and being on the market "still TBD" I still consider those as "delivered" in this context.

I'm talking about entire debunkings of products. Name one apart from Starlink that's been completely wrong?

You made it pretty clear you are a fan of "directionality" so again Semi, Cybertruck, Optimus, Robotaxi are all examples where reality went in the opposite...direction...of TF narrative.
I think by TF accounts SpaceX for instance should have alredy gone bankrupt a couple of times, Tesla even more than a couple and I recall TF said Musk himself was "finished" at least once.

So indeed no need for "micro-prediction" when the "directionality" is rather obvious...

[Yrouel86]

I didn't watch he whole video, but the even the guy in the video admits TF was right, and that he's just ignoring positive aspects. That's not really being wrong? it's more like not appreciating the future potential

The only thing that's right is that there is a payload mass penalty. Which rarely is a major limitation of itself. Look Starlink launches, nose cone is packed full. The most ridiculous was TF comparing its reliability with (implied good track record) the Space Shuttle... that killed 14 astronauts (which he of course did not mention). Although TBH it's much more reasonable than stuff he churns out these days.

I remember the big deal from the clown community about this "mass penalty" (CSS also a big fan of that talking point).

Someone on this thread made the point about conflating things that alone might be (technically) correct but together essentially tell a lie, I think you're seeing the other side of this coin: recognizing the single elements without seeing the lie being presented in the big picture so as if falling for the trap of how TF videos are structured (many things jumbled together making it hard to unpack and debunk in a cohesive manner).

Also yes TF videos went from clever bullshit to low effort bullshit and this ties to my previous point, as reality keeps going in the opposite direction of TF narrative it becomes harder and harder for him to sell his bullshit which makes him more and more deranged.

I've seen this happen other times and I find watching someone spiral down like that delicious and extremely amusing, one such example I can make is ESGhound. He kept predicting all sorts of bad consequences for SpaceX and Musk, particularly in the context of environmental violations, and as things kept going in the opposite direction he became more and more unhinged.
Here's an example of his late derangement (SpaceX did in fact have the license to conduct pre-flight operations of which FTS installation is a part of)


A more recent example of someone on the same path is Zach of JerryRigEverything

[Psi]

Personally I never say someone lied unless I have proof they knew what they were saying was untrue when they said it.
Otherwise it's just arguing over what was in someone's head, which to me seems pointless.

[CatalinaWOW]

My main point was intended to be the final sentence, suggesting the Thunderfoot is so down on Musk because of similarities in their personalities.  Not an attempt to identify specific errors by either of them.

[EEVblog]

Considering that TF generally portrays things to the effect of "not going to happen" (he rarely talks in absolutes like "never" but the message and overall narrative is rather clear) releasing the product in any capacity already proves him wrong.
And yes the Roadster remains the only big thing left to latch on.

You literally said it yourself.
To be fair, debunking stuff falls into two categories:
1) It's complete BS/pseudoscience and will fail based on the laws of physics etc.
2) It's never going to be a success because it's not going to be practical.

To my memory TF has never been wrong about 1, and has only been wrong about 2 once (Starlink).
The rest is either still up in the air, or just an "I hate Elon" rant.

[EEVblog]

I'm talking about entire debunkings of products. Name one apart from Starlink that's been completely wrong?

You made it pretty clear you are a fan of "directionality" so again Semi, Cybertruck, Optimus, Robotaxi are all examples where reality went in the opposite...direction...of TF narrative.

The directionality doesn't matter if they fail. All 4 of those things could very well fail to be successful.
In fact many people say that Cybertruck is, apart from a brief flurry of publicity and "trendy" and people wanting one, has already become a complete market failure.
The verdict is still completely out on 3 of them.

[Psi]

The Cybertruck is a failure in terms of expended demand vs actual demand.
It's still a truck that does truck things through. There was that issue about the tow-bar not handling as much vertical force as other trucks do, but I'd consider that a weakness rather than a failure. All vehicles have some weaknesses.

Whether it's an actual failure financially I'm not sure. They definitely allocated more production resource than they needed to.
I'm not sure how much profit the Cybertruck division is bringing in vs other Tesla lines.  I'm sure it's less, but if it's making ok profit then it's not really a failure even if the profit is pretty low vs other lines.
It's totally possible it's neither a success or a failure.

It's pretty normal to discontinue profitable things to replace them with more profitable things without the first thing being considered a failure. I think this is probably where Cybertruck is heading. The production line is probably better suited to making other things. So i expect it will probably will be discontinued at some point.  They have discontinued the Model S and Model X lines to make Optimus robots which makes sense given they are the oldest lines with oldest technology.

But I reckon the Cybertruck line will probably be next to go to make way for more profitable things, unless Elon keeps it around just because it's his baby, but I don't think he's that sort of person.

If Cyber-Cab or Optimus demand takes off and they need more space to scale up I'm pretty confident Cybertruck won't last long.

[Yrouel86]

Considering that TF generally portrays things to the effect of "not going to happen" (he rarely talks in absolutes like "never" but the message and overall narrative is rather clear) releasing the product in any capacity already proves him wrong.
And yes the Roadster remains the only big thing left to latch on.

You literally said it yourself.

C'mon we already established that you know full well TF is full of shit even if you're not willing to call him out explicitly and publicly.

What I meant is that he used to sell his bullshit more cleverly, telling a lie by weaving a more complex narrative, conflating things together, fudging numbers and using all sorts of other trickery to make his points.
It's the same way how snake oil salesman or influencers walk the line of what's legal to say when promoting their bullshit products without being explicit in for example making medical claims.

As things got more desperate he just started putting less and less effort in selling his bullshit.

To be fair, debunking stuff falls into two categories:
1) It's complete BS/pseudoscience and will fail based on the laws of physics etc.
2) It's never going to be a success because it's not going to be practical.

To my memory TF has never been wrong about 1, and has only been wrong about 2 once (Starlink).
The rest is either still up in the air, or just an "I hate Elon" rant.

Even about 1 he's been disingenuous in making his points, for instance in his video about the finding of phosphine on Venus he first presented the data (the spectrum) in a dishonest manner (basically saying that since no difference could be seen by looking them side by side the paper was busted as if that was the method the researchers used and not complex statistical analysis), there's a Doctor Becky comment under that video that highlights these issues (see screenshot of it below).
He also later in the video stitched together clips from other content creators making it seem they where blindly on board the idea of the presence of phosphine and its implications (I recall Periodic Videos being the most egregious example).



This ties perfectly with my very first post highlighting that it's not just about Musk.

But anyway, Starlink is far from the only thing he's been wrong about outside your point 1

Here's how he portrayed Falcon 9 reusability back then:

https://imgur.com/a/AJAzAZI

That's a perfect example of what I meant, he didn't literally say SpaceX would never reuse it, he "clowned" it instead.
And I use clowned as a shorthand for his typical MO of exaggerating how hard something is to do (while also portraying SpaceX or Tesla as incompetent to reinforce how hard it would to do the thing especially for them) or his usual ranting about "Musk promises" to just throw the new thing on the pile without even making a proper specific argument for it, or any other similar tactic that avoids speaking in absolutes but enables him to still lie and sell the same bullshit narrative.

And guess what Starlink was treated just the same:

https://imgur.com/a/i9pIMFl

Another example of the same type of tactics is when he conflated Superheavy with N1 just because Superhevy has 33 engines.

And there's a very large pile of such examples, pretty much every Musk company product has been treated the same way at some point (because he can't acknowledge anything positive).

The directionality doesn't matter if they fail. All 4 of those things could very well fail to be successful.
In fact many people say that Cybertruck is, apart from a brief flurry of publicity and "trendy" and people wanting one, has already become a complete market failure.
The verdict is still completely out on 3 of them.

It matters if the narrative is to the effect of "not going to happen" or "it's vaporware" or "it's fake" and then the thing happens.
The Cybertruck was treated same as the Roadster is treated now and then it was released to the market, that alone is sufficient to disqualify thunderf00t narrative about it.
This is especially true given the fact that he never really revises his predictions or assessments (busting) on something.

In other words if you believe the "thunderf00t bullshit universe" you have a completely distorted view of reality...directionally opposite if you will.

[EEVblog]

Tesla cars, Tesla batteries, Starlink, SpaceX, X, and xAI are all standout commercial successes.

Careful. Nobody knows whether anything X or xAI does is profitable. They're privately held.

Not really talking about profit here. Twitter was never profitable before Elon owned it, but you certainly can't say it wasn't successful. It was and still is the only social media platform that really matters in public town square discourse.
I literally won a $100 bet with Chris Gammell that Twitter would fail within 6 month of Elon buying it. He lost.

Now, you could say that in that case Cybertruck is also a success. But the difference is in the uptake and continued popularity. The Cybertruck was a bit hit when first release, it was the trendies thing ever, celebrities were falling over themselves to get one and wasn't a spare ones to go around. Now there are famously warehouses full of them, with a 50% decrease in sales in 2025. And SpaceX famously bought up a ton of unsold units.
X on the other hand just announced the other day that it's had it's biggest traffic day ever. More feature than ever, more popular than ever.

Ok, you can argue "commercial success" means profit, and that's the only measure. But in that case half the tech companies on the planet would be failures. If you own the market space you are in, then that's "success".

[EEVblog]

C'mon we already established that you know full well TF is full of shit even if you're not willing to call him out explicitly and publicly.

Now I seem to recall saying I wouldn't engage with you again because you won't argue in good faith.
I'll try not to forget again.
*plonk*

[Yrouel86]

C'mon we already established that you know full well TF is full of shit even if you're not willing to call him out explicitly and publicly.

Now I seem to recall saying I wouldn't engage with you again because you won't argue in good faith.
I'll try not to forget again.
*plonk*

How is it bad faith to not pretend you're naive and clueless on what the issues are?


You literally said that on Starlink thunderf00t "will have to eat a crow", am I supposed to believe that you think he was just innocently wrong on that? No sorry I think you're smarter than that.
This thread starts with TF spreading Starlink-election conspiracies, that alone has pretty big implications. Am I also supposed to believe that you think he was innocently wrong in retweeting that garbage? Please.

Replace Starlink with Falcon 9 for example and that's another crow on the menu. Now add every other thing that was mentioned and it's an entire buffet because the playbook he used for Starlink has been the same for any other Musk related thing since he started with Musk, because it's also the same playbook he used for Sarkeesian and even before that.

[EEVblog]

Bye.

[Yrouel86]

So after 41 pages who thinks thunderf00t was acting in good faith when he retweeted "Elon Musk's Starlink was the "Little Secret"
to win or steal this election."?

[Yrouel86]

Just to predict the obvious: the new Terafab that Musk just formally announced will be the new object of interest for thunderf00t and the like using of course the same old playbook.

He will present it as the latest new scam and argue in so many words that it won't happen and on the other side people will pretend TF hasn't done this same song and dance a million times before (being proven wrong later by unfolding events) and the cycle will continue.

[Psi]

It's going to be a super hard project, bleeding edge complexity and trying to do things never been done before in an effort to optimize things and reduce cost. But it's possible if he can attract the good talent from the current fabs and approach development from 1st principals, which he and his companies do seems very good at.

Most companies do not constantly re-examine every aspect of why the industry does things the way they do in the hope of maybe finding something better/cheaper/faster. So there probably are optimizations you could make if designing a fab from scratch and treating it as an engineering problem rather than the normal approach to make money asap and de-risk everything as much as possible.

I think we probably need a year or 2 to see how serious this is. If it lasts that long then I think it will produce chips eventually, It's probably going to be a 10 year project though and it's hard to say what the changes and compromises will be verses the current plan. It's also hard to know how the need for this fab will change as AI changes in the coming years.

[Simmed]

he is quite good at giga
im sure he will have no problems making them bigger

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Tesla_factories

[Yrouel86]

It's going to be a super hard project, bleeding edge complexity and trying to do things never been done before in an effort to optimize things and reduce cost. But it's possible if he can attract the good talent from the current fabs and approach development from 1st principals, which he and his companies do seems very good at.

Most companies do not constantly re-examine every aspect of why the industry does things the way they do in the hope of maybe finding something better/cheaper/faster. So there probably are optimizations you could make if designing a fab from scratch and treating it as an engineering problem rather than the normal approach to make money asap and de-risk everything as much as possible.

I think we probably need a year or 2 to see how serious this is. If it lasts that long then I think it will produce chips eventually, It's probably going to be a 10 year project though and it's hard to say what the changes and compromises will be verses the current plan. It's also hard to know how the need for this fab will change as AI changes in the coming years.

I agree it'll be hard and definitely capital intensive, fortunately Musk is pretty good at attracting investors, talent and building things from first principles so if there's someone that has a decent shot at a project like this it's him.

Given the delicate situation of Taiwan we really need an alternative to TSMC as quickly as possible.

Anyway to add to my prediction above the lunar mass driver concept will also be most likely mocked and clowned by thunderf00t, his bullshit grift just got a new lease

[Psi]

Anyway to add to my prediction above the lunar mass driver concept will also be most likely mocked and clowned by thunderf00t, his bullshit grift just got a new lease

Yep. It's his sort of target.

[paulca]

Lunar mass driver.

Sounds like a weapon to me.  Pick your target on earth, calculate the TEI parameters for a surface rail launch and FIRE!

Does this not fall under the Carl Sagan letter/piece?  "deflection dilemma".  That being any technology capable of moving things around in space, like asteroids and changing their orbits is too powerful a technology for humans to possess while we have a single "Earth" to live on.

As a side tangent.  "Calculating" a TEI is one of the hardest things to do "in your head" qualitatively.   Orbital intuition would tell you to "Burn retro" grade to the lunar orbit velocity in your "Eject" orbit and you will fall back to earth.  Correct.  Except a few things.  That free fall version takes over 5+ days.  You basically come to a stop and drop.  You will also need to pick your "correction" burn time carefully because once you get fast it will be much harder to correct.  You will have a relative velocity slightly higher then earth escape velocity, as the moon has more than earth escape velocity and only hangs around due to being orbit around the sun too. 

The other issue with "stop and drop" is that once the burn ends, the moon will try and pull you along with it for a while, this will cause your perigee to rise well away from earth.  If you get really unlucky you get caught in a Lagrange dead zone for weeks.

So.  The eject burn needs to add "Inward velocity", ie.  Angle the burn slightly to accelerate towards earth.  Then the calculations to "kiss" the atmosphere just enough to "no longer have escape velocity" and a "managable re-entry angle".  Then you have to take your impact point and scroll time along under the earth is rotated in the correct orientation that you impact in the Pacific or Atlantic.

The margins are extremely fine and each correction becomes more and more critical as you get faster and faster.  When I do it in Orbiter Sim I use a "half life" correction.  I travel 50% of the distance/time and then do a correction.  Then travel 50% the remaining and do a correction.  Until no correction is required or affordable.  Then sit back and hope.