Elon Musk on How to Build the Future

"Yes, he ushered in the electric car revolution, but the production carbon footprint is still huge!"

"Yes, he's building rockets, but he took a bunch of government money!"

"Yes, he's paving the way to Mars, but what has he done for world hunger?"

And it not just with Musk, but really with anyone who has been successful. I would have thought that the technologists were above such petty envy. We're here to improve humanity's lot, aren't we?

Startup industry is a great place to find tons of PR bullshit though, so I wonder if this isn't people projecting their own guilt...

Thats not to say that any particular criticism is unjustified. Just that tearing down someone for its own sake is not good for anyone - rock throwers included.

Ad money, like with all publishing. If they actually cared about providing useful content to people, they'd seek out those quieter ones and interview them too. Don't blame Elon for the market actors that want to earn money off his fanbase. Blame those market actors instead.

And let's not forget the millions of people who worked to generate wealth that could be transferred via, and taxed by, PayPal, accruing the fortune with which to start all these projects in the first place. If I didn't "know better" I'd be tempted to conclude that the luck of being in the right place at the right time with a good idea, is the main difference between Elon and the rest, or at least that any intrinsic differences are not as great as you might think. Heck I'm a "visionary" too, just add one billion dollars and tons of free time and see what I come up with! (Campaign coming soon to Kickstarter, LOL)

Man is at once animal and rational, and sometimes the rational side reacts against our own animalistic urge to designate an alpha ape and worship only that one ape. Many of us got into technology as a way of breaking down this same kind of bullshit hierarchy that you can find in so many other places & domains of human life. Technology was supposed to be the great equalizer. In some cases it has worked that way but in others it has only amplified the disequilibrium. It seems we can't escape our inner ape.

Therefore is it "technologists" to whom you should be appealing here for greater reverence? Maybe it's not your technological side, but your ape side, that wants to be more reverent.

Considering that housing is a pretty huge expense for the majority of people, it's a legitimate gripe.

That's a pernicious assumption. Technologists are still human and are vulnerable to the same emotions and biases of the hoi polloi.

Thread winner. There is little difference between a billionaire and anyone else except a billion dollars.

He could have invested his money, maybe funded some low-cost web startups, but instead he did what he thought was needed, financial risk being secondary. I think that's what makes him stand out.

I think he is so much of a nerd that it doesn't change him all that much. I like him better for that, but it's true he doesn't deserve the amount of credit he's given, simply because that's unrealistic.

But, if he CEASES to be 'that guy' and 'the visionary sole leader and innovator', it's less of an appealing story, and his businesses would suffer. He is surfing on a wave of attention which sustains the valuations of his companies, and using the valuation to invest in gigantic projects that may do a lot of good. Surf on, say I.

My observation over the last few years has been a steady decline in the quality of comments on HN, and a steady increase in the number of Debbie Downer comments.

No matter what someone is doing - there will always, always be a comment about how whatever they are trying to achieve is stupid and they should instead be doing x, y, z.

It's a shame, really.

To be fair, pretty much all of his companies rely on government subsidies. He's basically built his businesses around it.

I can't locate the post presently, and don't know how trends have progressed. The statistic surprised me when I found it.

He does trigger conservative-minded people pretty hard, which I imagine is partly due to how Tesla got politicized during Obama's first term.

I don't know how serious you are about the billion dollars thing (or what exactly your point may be), but I'd bet a billion dollars you wouldn't be anywhere as effective as Elon is with that money. The idea that any two people are going to be equivalently effective given $X is silly. There are just as many orders of difference in effectiveness with money as there are in any other endeavor.

I'm pretty sure in a zero-sum game (e.g. Our market reality), this is the opposite of true.

PayPal (really X.com) was founded based on: "17% of the world's economy is lost to the financial industry. Wtf, they are just numbers in a database, can't we do better?"

I dunno what the percent is now, or whether PayPal decreased it significantly (or increased it even), but the difference is Elon's ability to look at problems, reduce them to fundamentals, decide if they can be improved upon or not, then working toward moving reality in that direction.

So, if the 'PayPal tax' is unacceptable to you, the "visionary" thing to do would be, figure out what the root causes of that tax are, figure out why they are unnecessary and how much correcting them will move the needle. Any significant progress in this area would be worth well more than a billion dollars, and you'd have no problem raising that capital. Make it happen!

People are just much more likely to comment if they hate something than if they love something. Also if they disagree with something than if they agree. Comments in any online forum are not a uniform sampling of the views of the readers.

HN's saving grace is that many of the articles linked to are on subjects that are just obscure enough to avoid being overwhelmed by "this sucks/this rules" sorts of bikeshedding comments. Also most of the topics are complicated or obscure enough as to make them difficult targets for kneejerk nitpickery.

When he actually improves humanity's lot instead of producing boutique goods for rich people, then maybe we'll see more praise.

So...their plan being to bootstrap the large-scale manufacturing of affordable vehicles with a smaller number of more expensive sales, you're saying that Tesla simultaneously is and isn't revolutionary at the same time?

That was rather rude.

It'll be a while before his electric cars can really compete with cheap cars, but I'm sure he'll get there. He's making good progress.

Probably the same way Ferrari is, no point to make wide acceptance of that brand.

Elon like many great leaders before him is accomplish great things because he recognizes talent and allow talented people to do what they are good at. Too many talented people are held down by their leaders.

Of course if Elon was placed in Somalia he would have accomplished nothing. The talents and infrastructure he needs to do great things would not have been there. It is American society which has given him the opportunities he has exploited.

There's a lot of R&D going into this, and it's just easier to bootstrap a car company out of nothing while building expensive, high-margin luxury cars than when building competitive mass market cars. The mass market will come, but before it gets to that, costs have to go down more, and infrastructure for electric cars has to become ubiquitous.

Disclosure: I work at SpaceX as a technician so I may be biased.

Tesla has done a great job of dressing up a status symbol as an environmentally friendly choice. (Or vice versa.)

If you look at the poorer citizens in your country, you'll likely find no Teslas, and few electric cars in general.

- GM - $3.58 Billion in subsidies

- Ford - $2.52 Billion in subsidies

- Fiat Chrysler Automobiles — $2.06 Billion in subsidies

Took 10 seconds of Googling to find that.

Plus Tesla is actually innovating on a massive scale and pulling the world into a more sustainable, quieter future. I too hate subsidies but as long as the US Governemnt is going to keep up corporate welfare it may as well be towards the actual innovators building a better future than the laggards trying their best to maintain the status quo so they can extract maximum profits.

Nobody I know here bought a petrol car last two years; one got a plug-in hybrid. Tesla is hardly a status symbol here, it attracts customers both from the middle and luxury segments. People who in the past would consider Audi A5 or Volvo X70 would go for Tesla. The economics for electric cars are simply much better.

A quick search also indicates that your gas is 25% more expensive than France or Britain, and more importantly that your electric car incentives are so absurd that your politicians are beginning to roll them back. No taxes, no tolls, no ferry charges, no parking fees, free use of bus lanes. Electric cars there are cheaper than equivalent gas powered cars, because the taxes are ~50% of the cost. Yeah, with incentives like that, I'd probably own an electric car, too. I'm not sure this counts as an electric car revolution so much as a government handout, though. If the government subsidized 50% of the price of Fords, you'd probably see their sales skyrocket but no one would really call that a revolution.

Tesla is definitely a status symbol, though. The fact that Audi drivers moved to Tesla didn't dispute that because Audi is also a status symbol. Volvo to a lesser extent.

Parking is not free, although some municipalities subsidize rebates for EV spots in select garages. Urban dwellers (majority of EV market) nearly never take ferries. Incentives were clearly temporary from the beginning, you are hardly breaking any news to me here. The price of car is not subsidized, a Tesla here costs more dollar-to-dollar than it does in California before rebates.

Sure there are (also temporary) import tax incentives, but it's about the only way a government can encourage adoption of clean tech in chicken and egg infrastructure situation. There has to be some upside for being the first guy in the town who can't fill at gas station. As soon as it gains momentum, the incentives will be rolled back. It is however already clear that EV adoption in Norway is a success.

Also you have to be really really broke to see an ordinary German sedan as a status symbol, certainly not anywhere in Western Europe.

I'm not sure I did pick a poor metric. Income in the Bay Area is pretty uneven. You see a lot of Teslas at the Google campus, but relatively few at Wal-Mart. Salaries at tech companies are six figure but minimum wage is just above $10/hr.

> Parking is not free, although some municipalities subsidize rebates for EV spots in select garages. Urban dwellers (majority of EV market) nearly never take ferries. Incentives were clearly temporary from the beginning, you are hardly breaking any news to me here.

The article I read indicated that they were, but maybe not. Obviously the tax exemption is the big factor.

> The price of car is not subsidized, a Tesla here costs more dollar-to-dollar than it does in California before rebates.

That's not a realistic claim if the government is waving taxes that would otherwise amount to half the total cost of the car.

It's not very interesting to compare the absolute Tesla cost there and in California. What's interesting to compare is the Tesla cost there vs California relative to other options. A Tesla Model S in California costs about as much as a BMW M3. It looks like in Norway the effective cost of a Model S is closer to a basic Model 3.

> Sure there are (also temporary) import tax incentives, but it's about the only way a government can encourage adoption of clean tech in chicken and egg infrastructure situation. There has to be some upside for being the first guy in the town who can't fill at gas station. As soon as it gains momentum, the incentives will be rolled back. It is however already clear that EV adoption in Norway is a success.

I'm not opposed to tax incentives. My point is just that the "revolution" here is being driven by massive government subsidies. A 50% subsidy will make almost anything a success.

> Also you have to be really really broke to see an ordinary German sedan as a status symbol, certainly not anywhere in Western Europe.

I think this says something about your financial situation that you think the only way to see an Audi as a status symbol is if you're "really broke". I don't know about Norway, but most cars sold in Europe are not Audis or BMWs. Fiat outsells BMW and Audi. So does GM. So does Ford. And Peugot. And Renault. Volkwagon beats Audi and BMW combined. BMW and Audi are not "ordinary German sedans". They are luxury cars purchased by a minority of the population. They are absolutely status symbols.

http://www.acea.be/statistics/tag/category/by-manufacturer-r...

Guess what, same here. An engineer at Statoil makes a lot more than a janitor. Minimum wage here is higher and there's a more elaborate safety net, still living at that end is very uncomfortable. Again I don't see any takeaway from this.

> That's not a realistic claim if the government is waving taxes that would otherwise amount to half the total cost of the car.

This is a realistic claim because the government does not subsidize a vehicle with own money as it is often presented here, but withholds extra taxation. No taxpayer money harmed. Tax discounts are not unprecedented, e.g. tax code here has elaborate cases for families with children, people with disabilities etc. Two people doing identical job can be paying very different amount of tax. Different categories of imported food can have taxes differing by magnitude, and so on.

> What's interesting to compare is the Tesla cost there vs California relative to other options.

I don't think anyone had illusions that Tesla isn't economic in Norway relative to other options. That's why people buy it and I mentioned it before.

The end result is people here drive tons of Teslas and other EVs, and the market has changed for good. When tax incentives removed, people will still drive them, as they are simply better rides overall with simpler maintenance routine.

I don't see in any way why has Tesla miscalculated the market as initially stated. I see tons of their cars on the roads every day, so it arrived here. It is hilarious my benign remark was treated as some classist rub.

> I don't know about Norway, but most cars sold in Europe are not Audis or BMWs.

Look, I'm not sure how it's in the States, but a BMW or Audi won't get you laid in Europe. Kids won't drop their candy and men won't think of your "status". Cabbies drive Merc E class here (not just in Norway). Pakistani immigrants drive German sedans. Everyone knows they are more expensive but not out of range of a middle income family on a financing - just a matter of your priorities. Porsche Cayenne is "luxury", Maibach is, but A5 and the likes, made in hundreds thousands each year is not. Tesla is cool in its own high tech way, but salon trim doesn't give a luxury vibe either.

Point being that poor people don't buy Teslas. That's why inequality of income in the Bay is relevant. Wealthy engineers are buying Teslas because they can afford it. Most of the population cannot. Your government subsidies make Teslas affordable to a larger chunk of the population, but wealth is still a significant factor. Subsidies just happen to be a bigger one.

> This is a realistic claim because the government does not subsidize a vehicle with own money as it is often presented here, but withholds extra taxation.

These two scenarios are effectively the same:

1. Car costs X and taxes are Y. Government waives Y in taxes.

2. Car costs X and taxes are Y. Government provides discount of Y against cost of car.

Whether the government waives taxes or literally helps you pay the car is irrelevant. The net effect on the government's finances (and the customer's finances) is the same.

Again, I'm not saying this is a bad thing. But it is absolutely a massive subsidy.

> The end result is people here drive tons of Teslas and other EVs, and the market has changed for good. When tax incentives removed, people will still drive them, as they are simply better rides overall with simpler maintenance routine.

Maybe. I bet if the incentives disappeared tomorrow a lot of people would stop buying them, especially if the price hasn't dropped on its own. Hopefully incentives like Norways are helping to push down cost permanently by increasing the volume, though.

> I don't see in any way why has Tesla miscalculated the market as initially stated. I see tons of their cars on the roads every day, so it arrived here. It is hilarious my benign remark was treated as some classist rub.

I don't think anyone actually asserted that Tesla had miscalculated the market, only that there hasn't been a revolution yet. Good for Norway for achieving a local one at least.

> Look, I'm not sure how it's in the States, but a BMW or Audi won't get you laid in Europe. Kids won't drop their candy and men won't think of your "status". Cabbies drive Merc E class here (not just in Norway). Pakistani immigrants drive German sedans. Everyone knows they are more expensive but not out of range of a middle income family on a financing - just a matter of your priorities. Porsche Cayenne is "luxury", Maibach is, but A5 and the likes, made in hundreds thousands each year is not. Tesla is cool in its own high tech way, but salon trim doesn't give a luxury vibe either.

Cars in general don't get you laid anywhere. That doesn't mean that they aren't status symbols. Most status symbols aren't actually out of reach of the average middle class family. Smart marketing is to price these things such that they are affordable but also a decent stretch. That keeps them reasonably exclusive while also providing access to a massive market of consumers. This is no different in the US. Middle class families can afford BMWs, but most of them don't.

You're welcome to think that expensive cars aren't status symbols if you like, though.

True, but here they wouldn't buy cars at all, just use bus. The income extremes don't matter as much if we stick to the cars that are actually on the roads. If we restrict to what lower vs higher middle class buys, calling that 'income inequality' in original sense of the problem is a joke. The gap is not huge and social mobility there is relatively easy (in Norway).

> The net effect on the government's finances (and the customer's finances) is the same.

There are other fiscal effects as well, even if not explicit in annual budgeting. E.g. my town is mostly surrounded by mountains and every winter it has an exhaust cushion over it. Which triggers crises among the asthmatics, so the municipality has to introduce date driving for prolonged periods. E.g. drive with odd number licence plate on odd days and even on even. This has both direct costs and productivity losses.

The whole idea to push for electric was to reduce externalized costs of car pollution on population and the nature. Mind you it's not the first such an effort: in the 1990s, the government here (and in some other countries) promoted diesels vs petrol cars for lower emissions. That is until they learned about particle emissions of diesels.

And how it was done? Correct, import tax rebates on diesel vehicles. Except you never ever hear anyone saying "diesel revolution has not arrived" or "diesel has to be subsidised by government to compete".

> You're welcome to think that expensive cars aren't status symbols if you like, though.

Maybe I misunderstand the concept then, point is these cars are bloody ordinary in Europe. When I singled out A5 I meant it's being bought by people who previously would consider different class vehicles, as Tesla was meant to compete with 7-seaters and top of the line sedans.