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

[Simmed]

Musk will likely try to use his government position to avoid prison, remains to be seen whether it'll work.[/color][/font][/b]

There is nothing illegal against promising something leading edge technically complicated and then falling short on capability or delivery schedule.
If that was the case then every tech CEO would be in prison.
A tech CEO's job is to sell the sizzle, always has been, always will be.
At worst, under consumer law (country specific) you can get your money back if promised features are not delivered for a product you purchased.

he didnt become a theranos, which is good 

[AVGresponding]

Tesla should have stuck to making drivetrains. The illusion of FSD has pumped the stock to bubble levels, and now it's collapsing, and it will probably ruin the company, sadly. Musk will likely try to use his government position to avoid prison, remains to be seen whether it'll work.

FYI Tesla will launch a robotaxi in June starting from Texas due to how good FSD became.

Quoting your delusional post for posterity

[AVGresponding]

Musk will likely try to use his government position to avoid prison, remains to be seen whether it'll work.[/color][/font][/b]

There is nothing illegal against promising something leading edge technically complicated and then falling short on capability or delivery schedule.
If that was the case then every tech CEO would be in prison.
A tech CEO's job is to sell the sizzle, always has been, always will be.
At worst, under consumer law (country specific) you can get your money back if promised features are not delivered for a product you purchased.

It is illegal to knowingly lie in order to pump share prices, and then profit from it by selling at the top of the market. How he isn't already in prison is a mystery (it's not a mystery; it's because he can afford ludicrously large bribes, and the best lawyers). And probably because the SEC realise it would be very difficult to prove, as these sorts of cases are generally too complex for lay juries to fully understand.

Elizabeth Holmes did end up in prison...

[PlainName]

The facts are that Tesla market share is dropping in Europe despite EV demand rising

Which might be due to new models being around the corner so potential buyers holding off until they're available.

[Ice-Tea]

The facts are that Tesla market share is dropping in Europe despite EV demand rising

Which might be due to new models being around the corner so potential buyers holding off until they're available.

Yeah, no, that's not it.

[coppercone2]

Musk will likely try to use his government position to avoid prison, remains to be seen whether it'll work.[/color][/font][/b]

There is nothing illegal against promising something leading edge technically complicated and then falling short on capability or delivery schedule.
If that was the case then every tech CEO would be in prison.
A tech CEO's job is to sell the sizzle, always has been, always will be.
At worst, under consumer law (country specific) you can get your money back if promised features are not delivered for a product you purchased.

It is illegal to knowingly lie in order to pump share prices, and then profit from it by selling at the top of the market. How he isn't already in prison is a mystery (it's not a mystery; it's because he can afford ludicrously large bribes, and the best lawyers). And probably because the SEC realise it would be very difficult to prove, as these sorts of cases are generally too complex for lay juries to fully understand.

Elizabeth Holmes did end up in prison...

I noticed usually it takes a class action for pumping to get counter acted. You end up getting a notice in the mail one day if you bought in...

[daqq]

Musk will likely try to use his government position to avoid prison, remains to be seen whether it'll work.[/color][/font][/b]

There is nothing illegal against promising something leading edge technically complicated and then falling short on capability or delivery schedule.
If that was the case then every tech CEO would be in prison.
A tech CEO's job is to sell the sizzle, always has been, always will be.
At worst, under consumer law (country specific) you can get your money back if promised features are not delivered for a product you purchased.

I am always astonished by how quickly we've given up on the expectations or at least hope of truth from public figures, or people keeping their promises in general.

[EEVblog]

I am always astonished by how quickly we've given up on the expectations or at least hope of truth from public figures, or people keeping their promises in general.

Sometimes people have all the intention in the world of keeping their promises, but they simply fall short on the technology no matter how hard they try, or there are other mitigating circumstances.
Does anyone honestly believe that Elon doesn't intend for FSD to work? Or that he doesn't intend to go to mars? Or that he doesn't intend to sell humanoid robots?
And that he's NOT putting all available company resources and effort into making these things work?
This isn't Theranos level fraud by secretly using another companies products to do the testing and pass it off as your own. Or Nikola rolling an empty truck down a hill. Elon is genuinely betting the farm on this stuff eventually working.
Everyone is free to criticise the odds of the end result, but you certainly can't criticise the genuine effort put in in trying to achieve the promised results.

[coppercone2]

will power is not enough, if they find you are not meeting goals regularly (i.e. progress fabrications) it can be considered to be a kind of fraud

The way I see it happen before is basically like if construction is not happening when they say its going to happen. But it takes unstaffed lots and stuff to get there. Like if the bulldozers have not been fired up in 2 months after they find the employees are on furlough when you say great progress is being made (because you are 'negotiating' with the construction workers about a overtime dispute).. it seems to me that in this case the judge wanted the investors to have realistic knowledge of what is actually occurring. But if its a huge delay because some equipment broke down or its constantly raining (unusually so) it gets thrown out.

[EEVblog]

will power is not enough, if they find you are not meeting goals regularly (i.e. progress fabrications) it can be considered to be a kind of fraud

Nope, it's just failing, and you go out of business, and investors lose their bet.
Happens literally every day.
The only difference with Elon is that his ideas are bigger and higher risk than most.
It's fine for TF, CSS, others, and even myself to do a video or two on why FSD is going to fail, or why Starship won't work, or why Mars isn't going to be achievable, or why humanoid robots will fail, that's fine, do your video and say your peace.
But to just keep doing dozen and dozens of videos on every new snippet of news is, IMO, just silly. But hey, if that's what you enjoy doing, knock yourself out, there seems to be plenty of people who will lap it up.

[coppercone2]

will power is not enough, if they find you are not meeting goals regularly (i.e. progress fabrications) it can be considered to be a kind of fraud

Nope, it's just failing, and you go out of business, and investors lose their bet.
Happens literally every day.
The only difference with Elon is that his ideas are bigger and higher risk than most.

I definitely got invites to class actions for people making up shit about progress about laying pipes. Its not failing if you know what is happening but say something else is happening that will lead to something else happening as a kind of guarantee. Like they just said "It looks like you bought this because of this media publication that preceded a big jump in stock prices, which turned out to be shady AF"

[daqq]

Sometimes people have all the intention in the world of keeping their promises, but they simply fall short on the technology no matter how hard they try, or there are other mitigating circumstances.
Does anyone honestly believe that Elon doesn't intend for FSD to work? Or that he doesn't intend to go to mars? Or that he doesn't intend to sell humanoid robots?
This isn't Theranos level fraud by secretly using another companies products to do the testing and pass it off as your own. Elon is genuinely betting the farm on this stuff eventually working.

"On an as of yet undefined and unresearched timescale, I intend to get people to Mars. The extremely optimistic hope is to have it done in 10 years, though a number of factors may prevent this."
is not the same statement as:
"I'll get people to Mars in ten years, a ticket will cost 100kUSD, hell yeah! (extatic moaning of delight from fans)"

Everyone is free to criticise the odds of the end result, but you certainly can't criticise the genuine effort put in in trying to achieve the promised results.

But one can criticize the communication, in particularly if there's doubt about the claims being made in good faith and not just to boost the stocks, fan the interest and marketing, and get a nice little ego boost to boot. If a politician gets voted into office by promising to give everyone a check for 10k$, then there's a reasonable expectation of a check in the mail. When the check does not arrive do we say: "I'm sure the politician meant well, and meant to do so, but things beyond their control simply prevented this."

Either way, what should be the expectation then? Should we simply set our expectations of public figure speeches to hold no more than 5-10% of reality/truth? Are we okay with having merged "lies", "bullshit", "promises" and "public speeches" into one unholy blob?

[EEVblog]

Sometimes people have all the intention in the world of keeping their promises, but they simply fall short on the technology no matter how hard they try, or there are other mitigating circumstances.
Does anyone honestly believe that Elon doesn't intend for FSD to work? Or that he doesn't intend to go to mars? Or that he doesn't intend to sell humanoid robots?
This isn't Theranos level fraud by secretly using another companies products to do the testing and pass it off as your own. Elon is genuinely betting the farm on this stuff eventually working.

"On an as of yet undefined and unresearched timescale, I intend to get people to Mars. The extremely optimistic hope is to have it done in 10 years, though a number of factors may prevent this."
is not the same statement as:
"I'll get people to Mars in ten years, a ticket will cost 100kUSD, hell yeah! (extatic moaning of delight from fans)"

You must be new to to the world of corporate vision speak, welcome.
Do you even know how engineers work? Spoiler, they work best when they have deadlines, and Elon knows this.
Cue the "before this decade is out" JFK speech.

Everyone is free to criticise the odds of the end result, but you certainly can't criticise the genuine effort put in in trying to achieve the promised results.

But one can criticize the communication, in particularly if there's doubt about the claims being made in good faith and not just to boost the stocks, fan the interest and marketing, and get a nice little ego boost to boot. If a politician gets voted into office by promising to give everyone a check for 10k$, then there's a reasonable expectation of a check in the mail. When the check does not arrive do we say: "I'm sure the politician meant well, and meant to do so, but things beyond their control simply prevented this."

In that case you vote the politician out of office. Investors can effectively do the same thing with companies that over promise and don't deliver.

Either way, what should be the expectation then? Should we simply set our expectations of public figure speeches to hold no more than 5-10% of reality/truth? Are we okay with having merged "lies", "bullshit", "promises" and "public speeches" into one unholy blob?

Elon runs a public company making products. If you think he's full of shit and has no way in hell of meeting his promises, then you don't buy his stock or his products. In fact you can actively short the stock and bet that he's going to fail. Just like other investors are free to bet that he's going to succeed.
The nature of the stuff Elon is working is extremely high risk technology, with thousands of engineers working on solving complex problems, and building new bleeding edge technology, on a scale that is truly staggering, a ton things can go wrong. You can't possibly compare this with a politician not keeping their promise to give you a stimmy cheque. That's an insanely dumb comparison, they aren't even in the same ball park.
I honestly can't believe I have to explain this on an engineering forum.

Engineers working on complex problems need a deadline and goals otherwise they will just chug along and never get to the final goal. And CEO's need to speak to the market like it's going to be done by that date. In fact any decent big investor will insist that they do this.
If you are a CEO says "extremely optimistic hope is to have it done in 10 years, though a number of factors may prevent this." as you say, that technology CEO will be branded weak and ineffective and probably thrown out on their arse.
This is bread and butter technology company stuff.

[Psi]

Engineers working on complex problems need a deadline and goals otherwise they will just chug along and never get to the final goal.

Yep, Engineers need deadlines/goals.
Equally as important is that all the managers, and the driving force at the executive level, have an engineering mindset as well.
Tesla and especially SpaceX do this very well. The amount of pushback against solving problems the right way is very small at SpaceX vs a typical company.

[EEVblog]

Engineers working on complex problems need a deadline and goals otherwise they will just chug along and never get to the final goal.

Yep, Engineers need deadlines/goals.
Equally as important is that all the managers, and the driving force at the executive level, have an engineering mindset as well.
Tesla and especially SpaceX do this very well. The amount of pushback against solving problems the right way is very small at SpaceX vs a typical company.

It's also important to remember how "the right way" ties into "promises", especially when it comes to leading edge advanced technology.
Take the recent hoopla over Mark Rober testing AutoPilot on walls. Turns out someone else tested it as well and it looks like the v3 FSD hardware isn't capable of detecting the wall, but v4 hardware is.
Elon made the "promise" that v3 hardware was all you'd ever need to become a robotaxi etc, but after 5 more years of development it turns out that might not have been true. So everyone is screaming FRAUD!
Is it?, really? really?
With advanced tech like this you make a best educated guess of what will be possible in the near future, and sometime is turns out your educated guess wasn't exactly spot on as further development and testing happens.
Again, you can't say they aren't trying, or that the genuine intent isn't there, the FSD hardware and software is some of the most advanced tech in the world, with thousand of engineers working on it.
I've done a video on just a small aspect of this:

[PlainName]

Elon made the "promise" that v3 hardware was all you'd ever need to become a robotaxi etc, but after 5 more years of development it turns out that might not have been true. So everyone is screaming FRAUD!
Is it?, really? really?

Depends. If he'd said it would work and it eventually didn't, that's not a serious problem. But if he sold the kit saying it would work later on then that's somewhat different because he is not completing on the contract, and presumably the punters would have to sue him for a refund. Sometimes shit happens. The real question is: does he make a habit of this (not the over hyping but the failing to deliver on a promise)?

I don't follow what he is selling, but it is really hard not note that he does act fraudulently, whether that's through bumping his stock, the massive conflicts of interest he is taking advantage of, or just wheedling out of a promised $6bn for world hunger. So suggesting he is a fraud isn't far off, it's just that pointing to the car while making (or refuting) that claim is misdirection.

I don't think he is a fraud per se. He's just like Trump in that he doesn't think rules apply to him, a super-thin skin, and he has so much money he doesn't understand its worth, only that more of it is good.

[wraper]

Elon said if HW3 won't be sufficient, they'll replace it with HW4 at no cost for those who purchased FSD.

[PlainName]

Not a problem, then.

[AVGresponding]

Saying "We're building them now" (new Roadster), or "FSD is already safer than human drivers" etc isn't making promises, it's just plain lying. If you can't tell the difference, there's no point discussing it.

[Refrigerator]

All this talk about deadlines reminds me of the old saying:
"Never play chess with a pigeon. The pigeon just knocks all the pieces over. Then shits all over the board. Then struts around like it won."

As if a reasonable person would ever consider chess against a pigeon to be a normal thing to do in the first place?

I think the same about deadlines, and i agree with Dave on this one, that engineers work best with a deadline. But i don't think deadlines for engineers is the cause.
I've had plenty of exposure in the corpo world in product development and i can give a real life example of what happens:
Manager to team: "how long will it take to develop this device?"
team: "3 months for a working prototype and 3 more months to get it ready."
manager reporting to CEO: "we'll have the product in 3 months"
CEO to investors: "the product will ship in 3 months"

At every rung of the ladder there is a bias to A: give better news to look better and B: to receive better news so you can report the better news to your superiors.

That's why I think there's no point in taking deadlines from marketing material seriously. They've gone through several appeasement filters and got distorted beyond reality, so what's the point of believing them? Elon doesn't have time to talk to thousands of engineers, nor does he have the knowledge to understand what they mean, so there will be layers upon layers of "good news" givers before anything reaches Elon.

To me it's more important to know whether the thing will be done or not. What i've noticed is that, regardless of timescale, when someone promises to do something, that thing will either be done or will not be done. There's almost never an in-between and real world evidence will show which side the promise is on. I'm not much of an Elon follower, but taking starship as an example, even though it's been a rough ride, i can see evidence that it is improving at a rate that makes me believe it will be done to do whatever it's meant to do (take kids to moon school?  ).

[tszaboo]

team: "3 months for a working prototype and 3 more months to get it ready."
manager reporting to CEO: "we'll have the product in 3 months"
CEO to investors: "the product will ship in 3 months"

And it's usually worse. "6 months because we need an injection mould, then we will do some mould trials, and fine tune it. " And your timeline gets ignored. In my experience managers just can't seem to fathom the idea that things take time.
My favorite is when a part is not on stock, and the lead time is 24 weeks.
"So what can we do to speed it up?" and my honest answer would be that I don't give a damn, it's your problem that you promise things that you have no idea about.

[Psi]

Saying "We're building them now" (new Roadster), or "FSD is already safer than human drivers" etc isn't making promises, it's just plain lying. If you can't tell the difference, there's no point discussing it.

That is a stretch. 
When someone makes a short statement you need a lot more context to be able to conclude much about it.

"We're building them now" (new Roadster)
That could easily refer to building prototypes, not mass production.
Or could be building cars in CAD on a simulated production line as part of 'design for manufacturing'.
There is not enough context to be able to conclude that "We're building them now" is a lie.

"FSD is already safer than human drivers"
That also needs much more context to draw any conclusions on how it should be interpreted. FSD cannot be used without a driver yet, so that could mean that the FSD feature (with its human overseer) is safer than just a human.  Which I'm pretty sure is a true statement.

There is this tread today for people to call others out based purely on their own interpretation of some combination of
  - What they literally said
  - What they must have meant by saying that.
  - Some hidden meaning that they must have intended to convey.

And what that person actually intended is not even given a casual thought.


Like calling someone out for lying because they said the sky was red because the sky is obviously blue.
Not even considering that maybe they were watching a sunset when they made that statement.

Lying is someone making a choice to not tell the truth. It happens inside their brain, so you need a lot of additional evidence other than some words they spook to be able to show with a high degree of certainty that the person chose to lie.

[AVGresponding]

Saying "We're building them now" (new Roadster), or "FSD is already safer than human drivers" etc isn't making promises, it's just plain lying. If you can't tell the difference, there's no point discussing it.

That is a stretch. 
When someone makes a short statement you need a lot more context to be able to conclude much about it.

"We're building them now" (new Roadster)
That could easily refer to building prototypes, not mass production.
Or could be building cars in CAD on a simulated production line as part of 'design for manufacturing'.
There is not enough context to be able to conclude that "We're building them now" is a lie.

"FSD is already safer than human drivers"
That also needs much more context to draw any conclusions on how it should be interpreted. FSD cannot be used without a driver yet, so that could mean that the FSD feature (with its human overseer) is safer than just a human.  Which I'm pretty sure is a true statement.

There is this tread today for people to call others out based purely on their own interpretation of some combination of
  - What they literally said
  - What they must have meant by saying that.
  - Some hidden meaning that they must have intended to convey.

And what that person actually intended is not even given a casual thought.


Like calling someone out for lying because they said the sky was red because the sky is obviously blue.
Not even considering that maybe they were watching a sunset when they made that statement.

Lying is someone making a choice to not tell the truth. It happens inside their brain, so you need a lot of additional evidence other than some words they spook to be able to show with a high degree of certainty that the person choose to lie.

You keep on believing the  , I'm sure you find it very comforting. I'll stick to living in the real world, where when someone says "We're building it now" comes with some sort of evidence, ie prototypes (none exist), pre-production or otherwise, and where "safer than a human driver" doesn't also mean "It may do the worst thing at the worst time".

"Now" means now, and when it's said every year, many years in a row, about the same thing, without any actual evidence to that effect, any reasonable person might say, "show me the fucking money, you lying shitbag" (or words to that effect).

[EEVblog]

New video. For those keeping count, that's 15 Elon videos in a row now.

[MK14]

Removed link to make post a fair bit shorter.

New video. For those keeping count, that's 15 Elon videos in a row now.

I've had a tiny glance at the video, perhaps less than one minute skim through, at most.

I DON'T plan to watch it. (But might, sooner or later).

Because (partly thanks to this thread), I'm fed up, with thunderf00ts apparent, ONE-SIDED, view of Elon Musk.

I.e. If someone is being scientific, mathematical, making sound engineering decisions etc.  They normally need to consider the situation, from a number of different view points.

Although I'm not a big fan of their (as in Elon and Mr T..) politics and way of doing politics.

From a business (leader), point of view, which I think what this thread is suppose to be about.  I can't really disagree (even if I don't like the way they go about doing business).

This Thunderf00t thing, seems to be ending up as some kind of obsessive hatred thing, rather than a carefully reasoned analysis of things.

But, one bad or thing I do disagree with, as regards Elon Musk, is that he should have stayed, completely out of politics, and NOT got involved.  As he is supposedly a business leader, and his businesses (which are mainly owned by OTHER people, as I understand it), could suffer badly from contagious fallout, especially if things go pear-shaped, politically, sooner of later.  But also from a conflict of interest point of view.

With two exceptions, I would accept.  He could have chosen to make donation(s), to any political parties of his choosing, as can almost anyone.

(Secondly) He could have all out, gone into politics (ideally resigning from controlling interests, in the businesses), and actually got VOTED IN, which would be a completely different kettle of fish.  Much like Arnold Schwarzenegger did, at least to senator level.