And also a lot of toxic technology that shouldn’t exist. I agree with parent that many brilliant minds are wasted on zero sum practices at these hedge funds, because the potential profits are so high. It’s a useful social question to ask how we can incentivize the smartest people to work on the most important problems, since naturally there’s little profit in curing obscure diseases.
I look at Rivian with their forthcoming R2 and they seem to be making a lot of effort. While Tesla has been milking the same basic design for coming up on 10 years now, and even removing features. I can see an argument that Tesla isn't really trying to win, they seem to be coasting.
Tesla owner here, I agree. One of my cars is over a decade old and I don't see any compelling reason to upgrade. They're still nice, but aside from "Self Driving" the improvements in that time are fairly minor and incremental. They need an actual truck, not the monstrosity they're trying to sell. The new Roadster is six years late. Once the S and X are dropped they're only going to have three models on offer, and no matter how good they are that's going to leave out a lot of customers whose needs/wants aren't met by those three.
They got distracted by self driving and let that take up all of their attention. Now they're pivoting to robots before they've even got their first distraction working. They needed somebody who could tell Elon "no" about eight years ago.
False dichotomy. The market for BEVs isn't limited to BEV-only companies. Most considering one not made by Tesla are probably looking at an incumbent manufacturer instead.
Sure. I'll bet you that in calendar year 2028 Waymo has more paid passenger trips than Tesla. Loser donates $1k USD to Doctors Without Borders.
I'm not a camera only doomer, and expect that in ten years Waymo will also not use Lidar, or that the units will be incredibly cheap and well integrated.
But I think the pro Tesla camp is exaggerating how quickly the march of 9s will happen for them, and underestimating and how quickly Waymo will expand in the next few years.
I am in on this as well and will do 10-1, I will donate $10k for any $1k pledged (would easily do 100-1 as I am sure Tesla will kill robotaxi within next 2 years “to focus on alienrobots on Moon Data Centers”)
OK I'm happy to book 10k on this at 10-1. Or whatever the max is you're OK with betting. Prefer just to give to eachother then donate. Please respond if you're serious and we can trade details
We all know Tesla likes to play smoke and mirrors game with vehicle numbers — they have 300+ "robotaxis" but only 7 of them are unsupervised [1], and they shut down when it rains [2].
So let's use a metric that unequivocally shows who is 'winning'. I'm confident Waymo will have more paid rides per week than Tesla at the start of 2027 (I'll give you 2028 if you want). No other metric indicates scale better than passenger trips. If you have more robotaxis or you are in more cities, it will show up in the trip count.
I'll give $1000 to a charity of your choosing if Tesla beats Waymo in this metric. Fully unsupervised trips only, does not include trips with a safety driver or a monitor in a passenger seat, none of the usual games they like to play.
I own a Tesla (and subscribe to "FSD", >70% of my miles are FSD without issue). As it stands though, Waymo is by every metric objectively better at "autonomous driving".
I would also love to see every car brand have full autonomous driving. It seems like you think you must be in one camp or another, and that one has to "beat" the other - but that's not true. Both can be successful - wouldn't that be a great world?
It won't be called coding soon; Sometime in the future (soon?) we won't be talking about code. The few leftovers/managers/CEOs will only be talking about products not the code, not programming, not even operating systems. You won't hear about pull requests, or databases, or HTTP or any of that. You won't talk about programmers. At least not outside of "hobbies".
such a hilarious comment / mindset. he made the best selling car in the world 3 years running. neuralink is a great breakthrough. there are a string of accomplishments which individually would be the greatest thing many many people have ever done.
> he made the best selling car in the world 3 years running
Not only did Elon not found Tesla[0], but many employees have described the "babysitters" or "handlers" who are responsible for making him feel like his ideas have been implemented, so that his caprice and bluster don't interfere with the actual operation of the company.
To give him his due, he's a phenomenal manipulator of public opinion and image, and he certainly has invested a lot of his emerald-generated wealth into numerous successful ventures - but he himself is not a positive contributor to their success.
Trying to make a point out of whether he did or didn't found Tesla kind if defeats the rest of your post. He paid over 90% of the first funding round and brought in key people like JB Straubel. When the company was basically an incorporation paper and no assets. Under most companies people would have argued for founder/co-founder status at that point. So yes he didn't "found" Tesla but for all intents and purposes he basically did.
I mean, even if he isn't directly making a lot of the decisions in these companies that are doing well, it doesn't mean he doesn't play a big role in that still. He still had to pick a lot of these leaders, pay them well, keep them satisfied enough to stay there, and also give them the proper freedom to lead these companies. There are many people out there who could also manage to make these companies fail instead of grow.
I feel that a lot of people simply don't like Elon because of political reasons which are often also based on misinformed opinions. It also can't be denied that he is an intelligent person. You can hear it when he talks in interviews.
Now I think ultimately any ultra wealthy person is going to have some flaws that people can find and latch onto in order to hate someone.
> It also can't be denied that he is an intelligent person. You can hear it when he talks in interviews.
While I certainly won't deny that I do strongly disagree with all of Elon's politics, I'm being as fair and unbiased as I can when I say - we must be listening to different interviews. The man sounds like a caricature of a bumbling college stoner philosophy student most of the time.
I was shocked to learn recently how China is crushing it in renewables and electric cars. BYD sold 600,000 more electric cars than Tesla in 2025, becoming the world's largest EV brand. Tesla's sales have been declining since 2023, while BYD sales are rapidly growing, so the gap is likely to get even larger in 2026. This is an important trend, regardless of how one feels about Musk.
"It shouldn’t be new to anyone that population data in the poor world is bad" from the same author and same article. but cherry pick away if it makes you feel intelligent.
"They got more VC than me, therefore they are right".
You gotta have a better argument than "AI Labs are eating their own dogfood". Are there any other big software companies doing that successfully? I bet yes, and think those stories carry more weight.
lol this is capitalism buddy. food delivery exists because people want it and pay for it, you actually don't get a say at all on if it needs to 'go away'.
Tesla's marketing strategy is to have one brand with essentially only two models (the two >100k ones and the silly truck are rounding errors and hardly count), thus each individual model will tend to sell more units. BYD has more models and a bunch of sub-brands, as does VW AG and Stellantis.
No, because China is HEAVILY subsidized and given unfair market advantages. It's pretty easy to advance tech when your country will steal secrets for you and completely ignore patent protections, violating treaties in doing so.
Exactly. I don't understand why we always have to bash the US. I dislike the way China does business, and I believe the greatest error of the 20th century was moving all manufacturing there. I don't know why the government allowed companies to move everything to Asia when we could have killed two birds with one stone by moving operations to Latin America. This would keep all manufacturing on the continent and result in much less illegal migration to the US. Given the political climate of the past 20 years, China hasn't had to do much to plot the United States' demise or at least become the top economic power in 20 years or less. That if the US gets its house in order and at least 2/3 of the country rallies around, becoming, cue the music, great again (I'll see myself out, hehe).
> I don't understand why we always have to bash the US
because we still can (for now?) and it's better to introspect on how to improve oneself instead of putting everyone else down (unlike dear leader's example setting)
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