Musk has a history of building and shipping successful products company after company in spite of a constant amount of people saying he would fail. (X.com, Paypal, Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, Boring).
Nikola is a complete fraud that collected money from know-nothing investors riding on EVs and Tesla's name. They haven't shipped anything and probably never will. Bizarrely positively portrayed in the press alongside negative Tesla stories - I imagine because it's good for clicks?
I find it hard to believe the SPAC that brought them public wasn't solely for the purpose of allowing them to steal as much as they could from the public before they shut down. No idea how well they played it - I guess we'll see if anyone ends up in prison.
At least he got to con his way into a fancy ranch in the mean time: https://www.latimes.com/business/real-estate/story/2019-11-1...
People like this make the world worse for the rest of us (and make it harder for honest startups to raise money).
Some people are attracted to rich arrogance more than anything. It's why people pay money to read fluff piece autobiographies ghostwritten for billionaires. It's why people like martin shkreli still have strong fanbases on the internet. Tesla may be a good company, but good companies are not built by one person, and fanboys are usually blind to that fact.
1. Don't (permanently) run out of money
2. Get a bunch of capable people together and organized
3. Point them in a good direction
> 1. Don't (permanently) run out of money
> 2. Get a bunch of capable people together and organized
> By those measures, he's killed it repeatedly.
The problem with fraud and lies is not that they don't work. They work great. That's the entire reason people do them.
The problem is that they stop working after a while.
The dream scenario for fraudulent fundraising is that you make so much money with your pitch that you can make your lies a reality before too many people catch on.
As anyone who is familiar with kickstarter knows, it rarely works out that way.
But he's also no stranger to fraud, lies and defrauding investors. Solar roof is best example of that ([1] and [2] talk about it, but there's more stories about it).
Solar roof was 100% fake product, that was shown only to justify fraudulently bailing out his other insolvent business. Years later, Tesla still doesn't have solar roof product (they do some solar roof installation, of roof made by Changzhou Almaden, Chinese company [3]).
[1] https://ftalphaville.ft.com/2019/08/28/1566985766000/The-gre...
[2] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/09/solarcity-was-in...
[3] https://www.pv-tech.org/news/changzhou-almaden-supplying-tes...
I'm not convinced any of this rises to fraud and none of it is close to what Nikola is doing here.
The solar roof also does exist and they install it, I'm not sure how that's fraud? https://www.tesla.com/solarroof because they buy parts from China?
Elon staged fake product presentation a month before the vote to gain support for the acquisition [1].
> Those shareholders should be happy now with the outcome of letting Musk do what he wants. > I'm not convinced any of this rises to fraud and none of it is close to what Nikola is doing here.
It's not a fraud because it worked? Same as Nikola - if they end up delivering some products in the end and their stock will keep on going up, then they it doesn't matter that they lie now?
> The solar roof also does exist and they install it, I'm not sure how that's fraud? https://www.tesla.com/solarroof because they buy parts from China?
Tesla still doesn't produce any type of solar roof, that was suppose to be their huge technological advantage. It's same as if Nikola instead of producing their vehicles will become dealership for Nissan Leaf.
Main difference between Nikola and Tesla now is that Tesla did deliver some products so far, but both companies are using hype and lies to gather funds and generate more hype. Given how much founding Nikola gathered so far, unless the whole EV bubble explodes, they'll also likely deliver some products.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/28/musk-deposition-stockholders...
They have a number of installations in California that were done for real clients and are fully functional. It may not be viable or scalable, but it is absolutely not fake. It is an actual product that works.
"Still, the company does acknowledge that the demos Musk unveiled at Universal Studios were not functional"
(https://www.fastcompany.com/40422084/inside-steel-pulse-the-...)
Are complex, difficult, expensive products or services usually built and launched quickly? Do they occasionally require long cycles of iteration? Maybe the iPhone should have been thrown away at version one.
It's 2005, does the Falcon 9 exist yet? Geez, we're waiting. It's obviously all vaporware, a fraud, they could hardly launch the Falcon 1 without it exploding every time.
It's 2009, does the Model S exist yet? Geez, we're waiting. It's obviously all vaporware, a fraud, they'll never mass-manufacture electric vehicles.
(Some bold takes? Level 5 self driving cars the way we commonly envision it won’t ever come to fruition, SpaceX will never go to Mars, transhumanism will never come to pass, and hyperloops won’t either. You can come back in 5 years and gloat if I’m wrong.)
If you want to minimize their obvious accomplishments based on Musk's own incredibly ambitious long-term (decades out) goals, feel free, but that's pretty dumb because it's essentially meaningless relative to the rest of the market. If ULA were already sending colony ships to Mars, maybe you'd have a point, but they aren't.
Sure. I agree.
> minimize their obvious accomplishments based on Musk's own incredibly ambitious long-term (decades out) goals
Outside of the Silicon Valley bubble, that’s called “holding people accountable to the goals they set.” And I’m happy to give him decades, he still won’t achieve transhumanism, Mars travel, and the like.
SpaceX didn't lower Falcon 9 launch prices because the market is willing to pay their current price, but they sell something that costs them about $20M for $70M (competition's price is at $100M) and they sell something that costs them about $40M for $150M (competition's price is at $400M).
ULA (Boeing and Lockheed Martin partnership that used to have US monopoly) only exists today because the US federal government needs dissimilar redundancy, so that if something bad happens on a launch, the other provider's system can launch stuff while the first one is investigating and fixing the issue. Without this requirement, ULA would have been closed. Same for Boeing's CST-100. Same for Northrop Grumman's Antares and Cygnus. Same for Orbital's Dream Chaser. Boeing's SLS and LockMart's Orion cash cows will be shut down if Starship proves reliable.
Starship is much more speculative/ambitious and will require a bunch more iterations before they make it work. There will definitely be failures along the way, hopefully without loss of human life but that's not guaranteed. If they don't go bankrupt before they make it work, a fully rapidly reusable Starship (150 tons to orbit for just a few million bucks) will make all other rocket technology completely antiquated, 100x cheaper is too much to bear for national pride reasons.
Tesla and SpaceX have both achieved their original nearer term vehicles, Dragon/ F9/FH plus Model S, X, and 3. Full reuse and full autonomy currently are still out of reach, but both of those are incredibly ambitious that no one else is super close to doing, either.
Both Tesla and SpaceX are very successful, but of course Musk keeps raising the bar on what he considers success.
But you’ll have forgive me if I hold Musk to public promises he’s made, especially regarding self driving cars & Mars. At a certain point, what’s the difference between making a bold promise and telling a lie? It’s difficult to judge people’s intentions.
Becoming an inter-planetary species doesn't happen in a year.
I want SpaceX to succeed and they have a track record of execution such that I now believe they really can. I was hopeful before (and if you listen to Musk talk about it he didn't think they'd be able to really pull it off early on either but figured they'd at least make progress towards it even if they failed), but now I think a mars colony is a real possible outcome.
It's not a bold take to just state something is impossible until it happens, that's pretty much the default.
The bold take is to look at what might be possible and execute goals in pursuit of that.
For SpaceX this means reusable rocket technology to bring costs down (massive success here has them ahead of everyone else). Starlink as a revenue source is also a really good approach.
For Tesla it's the 'master plan' of roadster -> model s -> model 3, reinvesting in infrastructure and battery technology with vertical integration to build out superchargers and drive costs down. This has been massively successful and their EVs (particularly the model3/y) have no equal at any price point EV or gas. The level 5 autonomy was really a bonus on top of that EV transition that they've added to, and if anyone can pull it off it will be Andrej Karpathy and the fleet of Tesla's they can train with (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hx7BXih7zx8).
Bullshit and really big ideas can sound similar, but that doesn't mean they are - there's a lot of value in being able to tell the difference.
In the case of Nikola, they're just lying to enrich themselves and taking advantage of those that can't see the difference between a person like Trevor Milton and a person like Elon Musk.
But the point I’m making is more specific than that: you can’t call them successes because they haven’t achieved their goals yet. (But they haven’t failed yet, either. The jury is still out.)
Nothing bold about saying people won’t achieve goals and then disclaiming it saying people can gloat in 5 years if you’re wrong. That’s cowardly, the opposite of bold.
But you’re right on the other points —- I’m willing to extend the timeframe for self driving to 10 years and transhumanism to 20. And to be even bolder, I’ll let you pick a timeline for the Hyperloop.
Doesn’t mean those goals won’t be achieved, even if they are late, tho.