Tesla’s much ballyhooed Full Self Driving (FSD) demo was another wait till next year total flop. Some see it differently.
I have to give Musk credit for several things. For starters, I do believe he is a genius. Tesla and SpaceX are proof enough.
Second, Musk is the best salesman in history. Who else could promise FSD every year since at least 2017, not deliver and get away with it?
It’s not just FSD. Musk has promised affordable cars, huge sales of a revolutionary cybertruck, and mass production of electric semis.
In his latest pitch, Musk rebranded robotaxis as cybertaxis, and now is promising an autonomous van the WSJ accurately described as a “an art deco-inspired vehicle that resembled a giant toaster with an interior meant to feel like a spaceship and enough room for 20 passengers.”
The car could begin production “probably” in 2026, Musk said. He didn’t even suggest when the van might come.
Musk Will Never Deliver (On the Current Path)
Please recall Musk that in 2016, Musk said he would demonstrate a car driving itself from Los Angeles to New York City in 2017. It’s now eight years later and Musk still has not delivered.
Musk will never deliver as long as he insists that he will accomplish the mission without expensive radar.
For all his bragging, FSD is noting but glorified cruise control. It is level 2 autonomy which means there must be a driver behind the wheel at all times.
In contrast, Waymo does not require a driver. Waymo has actual unmanned taxi service in San Francisco, Phoenix, Los Angeles, and Austin, 24 hours a day and 7 days a week.
“After over 10 years of Full Self-Driving development, Tesla is limited to a 20-30 acre geofenced 5mph 1950s Disneyland ride on a preprogrammed, premapped and heavily rehearsed route with no traffic and no pedestrians,” Dan O’Dowd, a critic of Tesla and founder of a rival software company, said in a statement. “Tesla robotaxi is nothing more than the latest work of fiction to come out of the Warner Bros. Studio.”
The Musk Striptease Show
Musk is a striptease act in which he repeatedly promises to reveal all at the end of the show but never does. Instead he says “hey look over there” always trying to get your attention on the next big idea.
That is what spawned the cybertruck, cybertaxis, and the cybertoaster (excuse me cybervan).
However, they all have the same flaw. None of those ideas will ever work as long as Musk refuses to use radar.
That is why Musk needs something new.
Meet Optimus Cyberfriend
Optimus in Action
Given Tweet embeds now work only sporadically, if all you see above is a URL line then please Click Here to See Optimus in Action.
But Musk promises “You should be able to buy an Optimus robot for I think $28,000 or $30,000. It can do anything you want.”
Musk is the world’s best ever salesman. No one else could pull this off.
But it’s things like SpaceX that makes Musk a genius. He is going to rescue from deep space astronauts stranded by Boeing.
Starlink is providing internet service to millions without power from recent hurricanes.
Some try to take credit away from Musk by saying he did not create any of these technologies. O.K. Then that makes Musk the best assembler of human capital in history.
A Radical Proposal
I propose a shocking, radical, and controversial idea, never before widely practiced although a few brave souls occasionally try.
I suggest we give credit where credit is due, and none when it isn’t.
And on the political side, I suggest allegiance should be to ideas not individuals, regardless of someone’s political party.
Optimus Valuation
Musk said Optimus could one day add $25 trillion to the company’s market value.
US real GDP is $23.2 trillion as of the second quarter of 2024.
And we supposed to believe this Optimus farce will add $25 trillion to the valuation of Tesla.
When? That’s easy. Next year, of course.
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April 5: Reuters Reports Tesla to Scrap $25,000 Entry EV, Musk Cries Liar
Robotaxi Forecast
On April 8, I commented Tesla’s Robotaxi August Launch Will Be More Elon Musk Vaporware
Fact check: True.
Musk is like Thomas Edison. He has an army of good engineers doing the work and innovating while he is the front man getting all the credit.
Genius? LoL—He had nothing to do with “Tesla” autos which has soiled a goon mans name (Nicola Tesla)——He BOUGHT Tesla and Space-X is just a Fascist corporate takeover of NASA that y’all funded–Rockets can’t land like they show–Upward Thrust–Impossible. Twitter is censored like mad and they boot folk off of it ever second—Free Speech my ass. WEF runs Twitter, not Muskrat. “Freedom of speech not freedom of Reach (around).
When he “ran” Tesla in Fremont,CA he lived in Belair, CA–Southern L.A.–Fremont is 20 minutes south of San Francisco—Northern California–How does that work? It doesn’t.
He’s also a Satanist—-His Red Coat of Arms with an upside down Crucifix and 666 showed prominently. It wasn’t Sarcasm or a joke-Oligarchs ARE Satanists. He’s also a fool and dumb as a box of rocks.
The Boring Company–Now he’s just laughing at y’all. He’s just a Grifter and Trump soaks it up because he’s another Narcissist too.
https://mileswmathis.com/musk.pdf
“It can do anything you want.”
Just as Asimo could, back when he, too, was in the early “planning” stages. Things are always easy then.
There will likely NEVER, EVER be an undertaking, of any kind, in the entire US, for centuries going forwards, which will ever have a fraction of the combined brainpower and other resources, as well as singularity of purpose, thrown at it, that Asimo had.
What they did, was amazing. Yet ultimately…: Still just pointless, even despite all that (some useful learnings came out of it. But as far as the headline “goals”, effectively nothing..). It’s like building a ladder to the moon: At first easy, then impressive, then very impressive…. then: oh-well….
And compared to Asimo, none of the current hypefests even begin to rise above the level of children; some them no doubt very “smart” but still; playing with erector sets for a bit. Before they either get bored and move on to better hypes, or have to suck it up and get a real job.
“Musk is the world’s best ever salesman.”
Scamming illiterate children with nothing to lose even when they bet wrong, is hardly all that…..
He may well be good. There’s just noway of knowing whether someone is a good salesman, once everyone with anything left to buy anything with, is a certified clinical imbecile with capacity for critical thought substantially below what used to be viewed as slow among three year olds.
Trump is another one of the all time greats. As was Obama. And as is Milei. And was Chavez. It’s not happenstance that; while everything else in The West is falling downand nothing neither is, nor will ever again be, working; salesguys are hitting highs not seen since that snake guy was hawking fruit to naked women back in the day.
Hint: It’s all in the mooches. It takes two tango up a scam. The dumber, and easier to sucker, the other end of the scams are, the easier it is to appear to be a great salesman.
Of course, that doesn’t preclude Trump and Musk and Chavez and the rest from being great salesmen. But just as success at stealing candy from small kids doesn’t strictly prevent one from being the greatest thief in history……..
What is important to remember amidst the ever more pathetic displays of childish hype and nonsense permeating the ever intensifying #DumbAge, is that EVERYTHING which are now observed, are primarily the result of the sheer stupidity of those to whom a Fed full of rank retards have handed ALL wealth, ALL power, ALL influence, ALL fame, ALL attention. That is now the development which drives ALL observables. Any other explanation, for any observation, is at best pure happenstance. Sure, it, whatever it is, _could_ be the case. But with pervasive Idiocy being as all overpowering as today…, universal Idiocy is now ALWAYS the only prudent default “explanation.”
You have the same speech patterns as Kamala Harris.
“Tesla robotaxi is nothing more than the latest work of fiction to come out of the Warner Bros. Studio.”
Worked across the street from Warner Bros. for 20 years. Was one of our biggest clients.
musk is the 2nd best salesman in the world today. history has had much greater salesmen(john law comes to mind). DUMPY is number one today. not even a close call. the biography on musk is a page turner……….the first page alone will show how 99% of amerikans born the past century truly were born on 3rd base, and think they hit a triple.
Sour grapes time for the Russians, the Chinese and the Europeans when it comes to space travel. Musk just proved that today.
Just as “he” “proved” with electric cars 5 years back…. Before moving increasingly everything other than half empty promises to China…
SpaceX is great, though. Lots of bright people working there. It’s pretty much THE dreamjob for top engineering grads in the US; and even beyond, now.
Problem is the same as always in The West since ’72: SpaceX is a dreamjob specifically because there is effectively infinite, costfree, funding available, to effectively just play around with whatever is cool. Great while it lasts, but it never really does.
You really think The US will develop a supplier industry to translate the; admittedly amazing; proof-of-concepts they are so successfully pulling off, into boring, “mass produced” “space products” at a sustained lower cost than China/Asia?
America became the Aviation superpower NOT because of Wilbur and Orville, but because America was the place where the million little details which go into building and maintaining tens of thousands of Jetliners and all that goes into them, could be built most efficiently.
Anyone, anywhere can pull of stunts. Bolt some wheels to a rocket, and you can “outperform” any Toyota Corolla at both a drag race and at getting news headlines. And then…. what?
“You really think The US will develop a supplier industry to translate the; admittedly amazing; proof-of-concepts they are so successfully pulling off, into boring, “mass produced” “space products” at a sustained lower cost than China/Asia?”
Yes. It’s already there.
Stop the printing, as well as the “public/private” tax and “full faith and credit” backed debt flowing to the sector, and it’s redder than blood. Heck, it’s so one-way red, than noone even bothers contemplating any “complete loss of public funding” whatifs. Since doing so, is effectively simply falling off a cliff. There’s no sustainable earnings anywhere, if not for free money for hype, and the ability to lay virtually all costs off on the “public” side of “public/private” ledgers.
If one insists on being sufficiently myopic, and locklimit narrow, in one’s cherrypicking: It is; like in any area; possible to find tiny pockets of the whole which, with sufficient naivete and lack of critical dredging, can be construed to somehow be nominally “profitable.” Just as is the case wrt battery cars. And “AI”. And humanoid robotics. And all the rest of the nonsense.
Faced with market rates, market risks, market strictures and markets even remotely free enough to provide any form of guidance wrt what generates vs destroys wealth: None of those “sectors” would even exists as anything more than corner case, largely academic, sidenotes.
We’re decades; maybe centuries; away from any large scale, self funding, profitable space industry on much of any scale.
Even satellite launches, would be extremely hard to make numbers work for, were it not for tax money. Some, very high value-add-per-event launches may still take place. But man, would they be hard to make the numbers work for, if the launches themselves had to fund the whole thing.
And to that, add the additional “complication” of the sort of 15+(-?)% interest rates which are inevitable for anything truly risky, once armies of transfer-payment-enriched “investor class” dilettantes are not backstopped by the very transfers which are/have-already turning/turned America into a third world poverty experiment, and there’s nothing there…., and….uh?!
“Space” was a Cold War prestige project; political/military flex; in the 60s. And that was in an era when America was vastly wealthier and had vastly more resources at its command, than it does today. Today it’s hardly even a flex, but rather just a last-ditch desperation “look-at-me-I’m-roiding-to-make-up-for-my-low-T” sideshow.
And ultimately, as is always the case with such politically motivated support for impressive-looking-to-the-naive projects: The only lasting effect, is enabling, and hence entrenching, unsustainable cost structures. Making it inevitable that second-movers will have an even bigger advantage than they already do in natura, wrt competing for even the tiny areas where some net positive value add may eventually open up.
Again: Nothing against SpaceX. Their doing cool and awesome; and even hard; stuff. And they’re doing it well. Kudos to Musk for at least letting some of all those funds The Fed and government has transferred his way, into the hands of intelligent,competent people. Instead of to the usual cadre of illiterate waste on “Wall Street”, “real estate” and chasing ambulances.
But what SpaceX is doing, IS government work. On the public dime. Cut the government out, and they’d all have to do less cool stuff. Perhaps even none… And: The government they’re working for, is a government following the Argentina trajectory to a tee. Just a generation in arrears.
Seems that the ‘Robots’ are remotely controlled: https://x.com/zhen9436/status/1844773471240294651
More: https://x.com/TroyTeslike/status/1845047695284613344
My cousin’s roommate’s friend who has an uncle whose next-door neighbor is a janitor at the factory that makes Optimus said the same thing.
“Robotaxis” are already a reality in China: https://x.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1810280087419572325
Busses: https://x.com/MyLordBebo/status/1844772722074693824
Congratulations to him and his teams for catching the booster when it came back down to Earth using giant chopsticks.
Waymo uses technologic Incrementalism while Musk is a fan of leapfrogging current systems to invent a new one. It’s the BlackBerry vs the iPhone. Waymo needs a very detailed up-to-date map of the environment to work and it does a good job but can’t handle anything outside of that map. It is inflexible. Musk on the other hand wants to have the taxis interpret the environment and be very flexible and essentially mimicking the human mind.
We see this idea rolling into the Optimus which aims to do the same thing allowing it to be able to do all physical tasks a human can do. It’s very ambitious but doable and if it works out you can imagine the profit potential. His backers, stockholders and his employees know his track record which is why he has no problem finding money nor attracting highly-motivated smart people.
Of course Musk promotes his products but people buy them because they work
“Incrementalism” is indeed the problem with much of development research in the world.
NASA has been baby stepping for decades now. We should have a full working Moon base by now and a “real” space station 10 miles or more in diameter circling the Earth and building space ships from, so they don’t have to fight against Earth’s gravity to get into space.
Medical researchers should have had many diseases cured by now. Hell, we should be using stem cells to grow new organs for people in need instead of depending on donations. Hundreds of billions should have been plowed into stem cells by now but we got bogged down in childish religious arguments.
AI is going to change this bigly! One of the robot development companies has shown that using AI in a robot, they don’t have to program it with tedious instructions to do things, such as grip articles with its hands. Instead, AI can figure out what has to be done, learn the task, like a baby and program itself. This is what Musk is aiming for.
In his own words Musk explained on October 12 how he makes his predictions:
“For my time-based predictions, I generally aim for the 50% percentile date, which means that half my predictions will be late and half will be early. The press never mentions the predictions that were early, so it seems like I’m always late.
However, it is very rare that a prediction I make does not come true over time.”
Musk also alluded to the possibility of entering another venture or extension of his existing car manufacturing business, i.e. renting cars out as a service, when he said a car is used maybe 10 hours/week and asked, what if use could be increased to 5 or 10 times that number?
This is something I have long championed, a future where no one has to won a car, all cars are sourced from local fleets that can accommodate whatever size vehicle is need and deliver it to your door autonomously inside of 10 minutes.
Think about not having to own a car and what that does to the economy and how we live.
Personal insurance goes out the window as do auto insurance agents as a career. All cars are autonomously driven, so accidents are near zero and 40k people in the USA alone don’t lose die each year. Almost zero auto injuries/deaths will severely impact hospitals and the doctor business. Insurance companies lose a huge revenue source. House garages and street parking goes bye-bye. The job of an auto mechanic disappears as the fleet owners will hire their own mechanics and EV/HV’s will be much easier to service and maintain.
Any other benefits I missed or social/economic disruptions to add?
“Musk also alluded to the possibility of entering another venture or extension of his existing car manufacturing business, i.e. renting cars out as a service, when he said a car is used maybe 10 hours/week and asked, what if use could be increased to 5 or 10 times that number?”
What brilliance!!!
And, even better: imagine the several thousands times “that number”, which could be achieved by renting out fire extinguishers!!
Just like when all one’s got is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail; so also: Everything apparently indeed looks easy, when one has no ability to comprehend anything even the tiniest bit more difficult.
Musk could never pull any of this off unless he was — like the presidential candidates – an actor. He is fake.
The reason he was invented is because they need a Tech Messiah… someone to front for technology to make the barnyard animals believe we are not headed for the extinction heap.
Worried about running out of cheap energy – no problem – Elon has EVs and solar panels – he will save you!
Oh and when we eventually pave over the entire planet Elon has SpaceX — we will move to Mars!!! Or another Earth like planet that does not exist….
Elon is necessary to ensure that the barnyard animals remain hopeful. Nothing more.
That is why he gets away with this nonsense… he has the full support of The Men Who Run the World https://fasteddynz.substack.com/p/who-runs-the-world
NZ is running out of cheap energy and panicking … https://fasteddynz.substack.com/p/new-zealand-panics
Where’s Elon? Nowhere… cuz his solutions are not solutions … they are HOPIUM.
What’s Musk have to do with NZ?
Wow.
ha ha ha. i concur on most of that. the middlebrows will do as they are told. since at least 10,000 years ago. probably 50,000. anthropology 101. go to the ape house at your local zoo and study them……….
actually, he’s just playing the game the Govt created
Mike,
I like a lot of what you write but I’ll disagree with you here. Yes, he promises a lot. But he also demonstrates a lot of things long prior to their actual full scale production. And he’s not afraid to fail in public, ref cyber truck unbreakable windows. Name me one other production oriented CEO that goes out on a limb like he does? He dreams big and advertises those dreams.
Elon thinks Trump will pardon him for his financial crimes for the right price.
part of his calcs.
“And on the political side, I suggest allegiance should be to ideas not individuals, regardless of someone’s political party.”
Kamala supports fracking. If you support fracking, vote Kamala.
Kamala supports hacking. Hacking off boys’ genitals. That’s why she picked Tampon Tim – who made Minnesota a haven for “gender affirming healthcare” (sterilization) for minors. I’d say they’re weird, but evil fits better.
“For all his bragging, FSD is noting but glorified cruise control. It is level 2 autonomy which means there must be a driver behind the wheel at all times.”
Tesla’s already have self-driving with the driver behind the wheel, FSD would do without the driver.
“None of those ideas will ever work as long as Musk refuses to use radar.”
Why? I don’t radar eyes, yet drive in fog if I have to. Say you have fog or heavy rain, will Waymo cars drive full speed when everybody else slows down?
Criticism of robo-taxi non-delivery. Waymo can have the service in select cities, but has none of Tesla’s market share. That’s why having it in Teslas is a big deal.
our 1969 eldorado had cruise control and automatic headlights that would dim automatically with oncoming traffic. that’s a long time ago kids. do the math back to middle of last century.
Full self driving without radar is the holy grail; once he has that the AI vision that makes it work will be applicable to the robots, planes, drones, everything. Musk is right to pursue it, if he ever gets it to work it’ll be something ChatGPT never will be. Talking is only a little bit of what the human brain does.
So Musk is taking a gamble as he often does: Waste time and money entrenching a radar based system that will always be a workaround, a hack if you will, or concentrate on vision based AI to power not only cars but every sort of robot that can be made better using vision.
I don’t think people realize that Musk’s vision of full self driving and his vision of the robot are deeply intertwined, and that AI vision is the key technology he is actually working on. Yes, lots of other people are also working on it, so the breakthrough might come from someone else, but it is the key technology that will make true autonomous robots and self driving cars into a reality.
People don’t use radar. People don’t even use sonar. So it is possible.
You summarized it very nicely. Your car and robot must be able to see the world as we do and act as we would, only better.
What most people fail to see is that with true FSD, cars will “talk” to each other. For example, when approaching an intersection, the traffic control system will determine the flow of vehicles. There will be no lights or stop signs. Similarly, no speed limit signs. etc.
$30,000 not including DELIVERING A WORKING UNIT.
TRUE Genius, everyone, is CREATING and HAVING THE SKILLS TO FIND ENGINEERS that CAN MAKE WORKING PROTOTYPES and PROVING that they can serve us,
Prototypes are easy to make. Manufacturing them at an affordable price is where most companies fail.
he has some brains and also a great flim flam man.
Bingo! All of the FED fueled liquidity sloshing around guarantees the gamblers are getting a huge chunk and hyped meme stocks are rocket fuel. I’d actually like to buy some SpaceX or Starlink but Mr Musk only dumps the truly high risk stuff on the chumps in the public exchanges and keeps the stuff with giant upside to himself and a few associates.
Too bad he can’t run for President! Following in Trump’s footsteps…
Would be a waste. He belongs in the starship lab.
RoboTaxi motto: We deliver — dead or live.
Nicola Tesla was a genius. He was also eccentric. Though many would also say he was crazy. He died penniless.
Many consider Musk a genius. I used to think that too. But now I think different. Like many highly successful people, he is just another narcissist with visions of grandeur, a need for admiration and a lack of empathy.
I have to give him credit though for taking advantage of the USA, the land of opportunity, to create the businesses that have made him wealthy.
Sometimes it’s a fine line between success and failure. There were several times when Tesla teetered on the brink of collapse. But it survived and is now valued at 680 billion.
Maybe you just don’t like African-Americans.
I think that the Down-Voter does not recognize sarcasm.
What a strange interpretation. I did not say I like Musk, or dislike Musk. I merely made an observation. Perhaps you are not familiar with the English language?
Don’t know why he’s cavorting with Trump. He needs to be working on SpaceX’s Mars program.
I imagine he craves the attention.
Nothing wrong with putting some resources into going to Mars. We have been exploring there with rovers and a drone for 27 years now. But it’s mostly research. Musk’s dream of colonizing Mars won’t happen in his lifetime. Though we may set foot on Mars in the next 2 decades.
just like we set foot on the moon in 1969.
Creation exnihilo equals zero.
I understand why you love high-dividend stocks now.
Not all high dividend stocks. Just the ones with growing cash flows, little or no debt, and a willingness to buyback shares when share prices pull back to bargain levels. For example: Canadian Natural, Suncor, Whitecap, Peyto, Tourmaline.
You are not a risk-taker but more of an accountant. It’s another way to wealth.
I took my risks when I was younger. Most (not all) of them paid off pretty well. I take fewer risks today. Though some might say that having 60% of my stock portfolio in oil and gas stocks is above average risk.
Particularly when compared to many here who seem to be sitting in cash and gold, while waiting for the next depression.
Musk has been quite open about why he supports Trump: because the democrat party has become the party of censorship and woke ideology. Musk wants to maintain free speech. He lost his son to the woke mind virus.
Every highly-successful person I know was pushed by his inner demons to succeed. As Ragnar Lothbrok said, happiness is fleeting. It’s better to have your name remembered forever.
I wake up happy every day. And look forward to improving my life. I am enjoying the ride.
No one will remember my name in a thousand years.That’s okay with me.
That’s why you are not someone like Musk. I am a risk-taker by nature but nowhere near where Musk is. He will be remembered while we won’t. I just hope my kids and grandkids don’t sell my shares because the upside could be “astronomical”.
Yep. People tend to remember the highly successful risk takers who do spectacularly well. But even their names fade over time.
John Paulson made a big bet that paid off due to the housing crash.
Michael Burry was similar.
Their names are already fading.
Ask a teenager; who is Steve Jobs? Or Steve Wozniak?
But some have names we remember still and the list is long.
True. Hitler will be remembered for a long time.
tommy edison was also a great genius and huckster. i have a good friend whose family invested in the man edison in an old “angel investor group of rich folks in NYC area”. they lucked out and became fabulously wealthy.
Agree.
Just Musk being Musk. I bet he’s a firm believer of “If it ain’t broke; don’t fix it” It would explain a lot, in terms of his actions.
Au contraire. He believes in simplifying things that aren’t broke to make them better.
Lay off Elon. He’s an African-American immigrant.
However, he DOES the laying off.