1/ Basic premise was they keep highlighting their entry into larger and larger markets and so investors keep ponying up $ for the ambition.
2/ First, it was taxis
3/ Then, it was taxis + logistics
4/ Then taxis, logistics, vehicle ownership
5/ Then taxis, logistics, vehicle ownership, autonomous
6/ Then taxis, logistics, vehicle ownership, autonomous,
trucking
7 / Then taxis, logistics, vehicle ownership, autonomous,
trucking, drones
8/ I might have the order wrong but each spins Uber into addressing an even larger Total Addressable Market
9/ While they never actually own even the first one (taxis) yet. But investors love the ambition and keep ponying up.
It's hard to say whether Musk is doing something similar or not. Satellites, boring company, mars mission, electrified grid, etc....Obviously, Kalanick is much different than Musk, but I can't help but feel pattern recognition creeping up on me.
In a ponzi scheme, nothing is created. Uber has created a service used by millions and which tens of thousands of people make an income from.
Tesla has created products that hundreds of thousands of people use, millions want, and hundreds of millions admire. Tens of thousands of people work in their factories. To many of us, their products hold a promise of a better future. SpaceX is reopening a chapter of human exploration that nation states had closed. Literally the most powerful organisation in human history, the United States, had all but given up on it. In my mind, landing a rocket is one of the most astonishing technological feats by humanity in decades. And it was done by a startup.
Now, I don't know what you spend your days doing, but I cannot compete with Musk. And I am just talking about his achievements until now, not the potential future ones.
I get that from an investor point of view, Tesla might have created little of value if it bankrupts soon. Eventually, though, all companies bankrupt or close in other ways, and so will Tesla. But the EV revolution that Tesla started will not stop. The cars are still there, the ideas have been proven. Is the comparison with ponzi schemes really a good one?
Please, spare me. Uber had a pattern of malicious and immoral behavior from the start. As soon as I read about them tracking people's ride patterns at company parties for laughs, I knew exactly what kind of company Uber was. Since then, their moral shortcomings have only diversified, unsurprisingly.
Musk, by contrast, has show over and over that he cares a lot about doing what's right, starting with the very fundamental purposes of his companies: not profit, but making things better for everyone, with profit as a necessary part of the real goal. To point to a recent quote from his twitter, he had said he didn't care if his participation in Trump's panels hurt his reputation or that of his companies, because it was right and he didn't care what people said. And it seems (and many people close to him have said as much in interviews) that this is very much in line with who he is as a whole. Every time someone has made an accusation against his companies of a customer or employee being shortchanged, he's publicly investigated it and resolved it within a couple days. I recall him saying in one such case that if indeed a contractor had been injured on Tesla property, he would have seen to it that they were completely compensated in every way, even if a court did not compel them to do so, simply because it was the right thing to do.
I hate seeing a company mired in wrongdoing compared to a company like Tesla, which is the polar opposite.
Then we come to this accusation of a "ponzi scheme of ambition." Did your creeping pattern recognition notice that Tesla is being led by the same person who leads SpaceX? I don't understand how people can write this off. No matter what your criticism or doubts of Tesla are, it's simply impossible to deny SpaceX's astounding accomplishments. This is obviously not a CEO who fails to deliver despite unparalleled challenges. Do you truly believe manufacturing another car, after having already succeeded with the Model S, is harder than starting a successful space program from scratch?
Musk doesn't do Ponzi schemes. He builds Paypals and Model S's and rockets that have successfully landed when industry leaders mocked it as impossible.
What achievement of Musk was "mocked as Impossible"? Now, was those really impossible or even hard enough; or some kind of cheap PR stunt to blow their achievements out of proportions?
A great many people said reusable rockets were not going to happen and that the pursuit of the technology would end in failure.
The same has been said (and continues to be said in this thread) of the ambition to revolutionize the automotive market with a compelling affordable electric car.
Cheap pr stunt? What? How the hell is it even possible to blow SpaceX's accomplishments out of proportion? What they've done is indisputably astonishing. Are you trying to minimize it?
>A great many people said reusable rockets were not going to happen and that the pursuit of the technology would end in failure.
A great many people said? Where? And more importantly, why? For what reasons did they say it was not possible? Was it impossible by laws of physics?
What "breakthrough" in physics did spacex make that made this suddenly possible? How come we never hear of any such breakthroughs, but only about these PR stunts?
I had a colleague of mine (who works on rockets/spaceflight, has done so for decades) say the barge landing was impossible.
As far as your other demanding questions, no breakthroughs in physics have been necessary to make reusable launch possible. People have constantly made predictions that somehow physics precludes reuse, let alone fast turnaround reuse, from being possible. But that has never, ever been the case. Still people (who ought to know better) will continue making such ridiculous statements. And yes, SpaceX has disproven a lot of these myths.
Privately developed orbital rocket (i.e. not based on government missile parts, etc): Falcon 1, done.
Privately developed capsule return from orbit: Dragon, done.
Vertical landing recovery of a first stage for an orbital rocket: Falcon 9, done.
First landing on an autonomous ship: Falcon 9, again, done.
In less than a month, they'll also do their first orbital flight on a reused first stage.
Lesser-known accomplishments by SpaceX:
Merlin 1D has a thrust to weight ratio of about 180-200 in its latest incarnation. That's dramatically better than the next-best, the NK-33 (at 137). And it's a big reason they've been successful at recovering so many stages without a prohibitive performance penalty. And it accomplished this by using deep propellant subcooling, which had never been done before except in some subscale tests.
Supersonic retropropulsion of the first stage is also something that had never been done before. It's a key enabling technology for Mars landings, and NASA was scared to baseline it for any of their Mars architectures and couldn't afford the tens of millions for a dedicated test. SpaceX gave them the data for free (in exchange for some in-kind services like data collection, but no money). Now every NASA human-scale Mars lander concept assumes the use of supersonic retropropulsion. This is a big change.
Crew around the Moon is not a PR stunt but a revenue source for SpaceX. Red Dragon is not a PR stunt but a key in SpaceX's (and the world's) ability to land large payloads on Mars and test the ISRU technology needed for sustainable crewed Mars missions.
Raptor, which has already had some test fires, is a truly scifi engine. It'll be the highest performance engine (in terms of chamber pressure, which is a key metric for thrust to weight ratio, and especially Isp for a given propellant combination, and also for thrust from a given engine size and thus for manufacturing efficiency) ever. A full-flow staged combustion engine, two-stage turbopump. It's insanely high performance and will get similarly high thrust-to-weight ratio as Merlin in spite of using a less dense propellant.
The ITS will dwarf all other launch vehicles in terms of raw size, raw thrust, raw payload, and especially its fully reusable upper stage/spacecraft combo.
And it's not even that SpaceX are the first ones to imagine these technologies (although some details are novel), it's that they're actually doing them. And that's a big difference. There are virtually no good ideas in aerospace that were not at least imagined by the end of the 1960s, but the vast, vast majority have languished. There have been several other abortive attempts to develop a low-cost private launch company, and (beside Orbital, which has a very different company mindset now) SpaceX is essentially the first successful one.
There will be others, but they were catalyzed by SpaceX. SpaceX's high churn rate has fertilized the whole American rocket industry. And this is very good. Even if SpaceX fails now, Blue Origin will succeed where SpaceX has prepared the ground. (Blue Origin essentially /cannot/ fail, since it's bankrolled by Jeff Bezos, who has more money than God.)
No, they didn't give any specific reasons, although I think he was thinking about the instability of the ship and lack of good enough precision landing (on the rocket-side) and station-keeping (on the ship side) as well as waves changing the angle and height of the ship. Of course, these are just engineering challenges that in hindsight look easy.
But this same thinking applies to almost everything Musk does that people think can't be done. For things in the future, consider Hyperloop and ITS.
Unfortunately I'm unable to continue responding to you, since the responses I start to give at this point usually cause the HN admin to show up and ask me to speak civilly.
I'm going to second aerovistae. I think there are plenty of glaring differences between Uber and Tesla that make your comparison just amount to throwing shade:
1. First, I haven't heard many people argue that they think Musk's end state isn't viable. That is, Musk has already proven you can build a great electric car, the question is just whether he can solve the production issues and scale up (especially battery production) fast enough before he runs out of money. But if he does get there before he runs out of money, people agree he will have huge moats around his business with his technology, brand desirability and the gigafactory. Contrast this with Uber, where a lot of people think that in the end state (when VC money stops subsidizing every ride) that it will essentially be a commodity business with very poor economic fundamentals.
2. Uber has had story after story of fundamental problems with their corporate culture, while everything I've read about Tesla appears to be almost the exact opposite.
Musk has stated that his ambition is in colonizing Mars. To achieve that he's building the companies to make it a profitable endeavor. When he succeeds he will have built a path for others to follow to also have a commercially viable option to explore space.
Travis on the other hand is apparently running a fraternity that spies on you. About the worst of the worst coming out of Uber.
i think this is unfair. I am not a big fan of uber, but uber already provides value, has a solid service and penetrates international markest (not native, is this...right? sounds kinda wrong imho). Autonomous driving complements their original target (taxis) and makes it possible conquer new markets. I get what your idea is, but i think it's wrong because what they do makes sense and they are actually building (and delivering!) stuff.
They might gamble too high and loose big time, but i wouldn't call it a ponzi scheme.
So I've personally made 6 figures on TSLA. If I'm an idiot, what does that make someone who thought they were smarter than someone who would invest in TSLA?
Here's the thing about investment: whether you're playing the long or short game, the only way you make money is through stock volatility. And as far as volatility is concerned, TSLA has been fantastic to play over and over again.
The comment I replied to talked about Uber, not TSLA. I can't understand your need to brag about how much money you made, but yeah, it would be cool if you could read first.
1/ Basic premise was they keep highlighting their entry into larger and larger markets and so investors keep ponying up $ for the ambition. 2/ First, it was taxis
3/ Then, it was taxis + logistics
4/ Then taxis, logistics, vehicle ownership
5/ Then taxis, logistics, vehicle ownership, autonomous
6/ Then taxis, logistics, vehicle ownership, autonomous, trucking
7 / Then taxis, logistics, vehicle ownership, autonomous, trucking, drones
8/ I might have the order wrong but each spins Uber into addressing an even larger Total Addressable Market
9/ While they never actually own even the first one (taxis) yet. But investors love the ambition and keep ponying up.
10/ Hence, the ponzi scheme of ambition
https://twitter.com/asanwal/status/820365771834531841"
It's hard to say whether Musk is doing something similar or not. Satellites, boring company, mars mission, electrified grid, etc....Obviously, Kalanick is much different than Musk, but I can't help but feel pattern recognition creeping up on me.