> as long as he expects the technology to exist at some point, the fact that he's parked a big chunk of cash in the idea gives him an advantage.
It also let's you point to two (major) successes while dismissing the Boring Company, Nuerolink, SolarCity and the Hyperloop, among others that went nowhere. Not that his sucess rate is anything to be embarrassed by, but his announcement alone doesn't lead to me expecting anything to ever be commercially available.
SolarCity was not Musk lead company, he was just an investor. SolarCity was acquired and is part of Tesla and while they had to remove resources from Solar during the manufacturing difficulty and scaling difficulty the solar and home energy part of their business is still growing very well.
I think its fair to say that going into solar was not as successful as Tesla hoped, but neither is it a failure. In the last year the growth of the business line has been finally showing promising growth.
They are starting to work with more outside contractors and they have the cheapest solar product on the market.
> Nuerolink
The company still exists, they are working very hard on a very difficult problem. They are still adding people. They are working on something incredibly hard, has never been done before and will require a lengthy regulatory approval process.
They did not announce a timeline for a product that they failed to hit.
What exactly is your issue with the company?
> Boring Company
They are growing, have an engineering team working on the technology. Their commercial bids are very competitive. They have established test sights in California and Texas. They have made quite a few improvements already and in the publicly available data their commercial bids seem to be competitive.
Apparently its a failure because the first product they ever did didn't meet the your standards or something. The costumer of that product seems to be happy and wants to extend the project. But who cares about happy costumers, what matters if how much people on HN like it.
So how exactly is this a failure? I would be my ass that Boring Company valuation now is significantly higher then when it started. And I bet its already more successful then most startups.
If that is your definition of 'going nowhere' I wish my projects would turn into companies of that size.
> Hyperloop
Maybe go back and actually read what was said at the time. Musk literally said he wasn't gone work on it. So your critic is that project he never said he was gone do didn't get done?
That makes no sense. He literally said 'I posting this paper, maybe somebody wants to work on it, I have no time to do it'.
If these are considered 'failures' now I really have done nothing in my life. I mean I haven't even created a single 100M+ company yet. Seems to me the only one that actually didn't go anywhere is the one that he said he wasn't going to do.
That's my point. You talked about companies that are 15, 5, and 5 years old as "not announcing a timeline they failed to hit" when I claimed they had produced nothing so far. Which, one, is a crazy standard to volunteer with Musk as he regularly fails to hit timelines he announces. But my point was he invests in things for years - decades - without any public progress but also without pulling out investment. The "heads I win, tails I flip again" is what I was commenting on. SolarCity (where, far from being uninvolved, Musk was Chairman of the Board) is older (in Elon involvement) than Tesla; if Tesla is a "success" how little would SolarCity have to do to be a "failure"?
How do you feel about Blue Origin, which Bezos regularly infused billions into before it finally got to its first flight?
The Hyperloop, is something Musk spent over a calendar year and numerous engineering assets working on before he decided to give up and open-source their work. If any of his projects was an unreserved failure, it was the hyperloop.
I don't get why you're so upset about this. I didn't say Musk was horrible. I just pointed out a lot of his projects tend to fail. I explicitly said that his success rate is good. I just also pointed out he has enough misfires that there's no reason to believe his announcements at this stage are going to see commercial availability.
> The Hyperloop, is something Musk spent over a calendar year and numerous engineering assets working on before he decided to give up and open-source their work. If any of his projects was an unreserved failure, it was the hyperloop.
Can you provide me with a source on that? During that time he was full time for Tesla and SpaceX and they were very busy during that time with other projects. So I can't see how this much engineering was put into it.
Also, not doing a project is not the same as failing at doing something.
The result of the investigation was clearly, I think its a good idea but I have no time to do it. Maybe somebody else will.
I think he still hopes to eventually put a Hyperloop type system into a boring tunnel, but he thinks shorter range solution are more important and tunneling technology needs to improve to make it viable.
> SolarCity
I agree it could have been a failure, but also don't know that for sure.
> I don't get why you're so upset about this. I didn't say Musk was horrible. I just pointed out a lot of his projects tend to fail.
I am not upset, I just pointed out for the most part his projects do not fail. You pointed to one project they didn't actually do more then a initial technical evaluation on. And on project that could have failed, but actually didn't.
I think objectively if any person said 'I'm gone do X project' (that was considered incredibly difficult), I can't think of many that would have more credibility then Musk (ie Tesla, SpaceX or a new company).
A humanoid robot is a risky project for sure and it does not seem to be the same level of importance as batteries or reusable rockets, so maybe they will abandoned it at some point.
It also let's you point to two (major) successes while dismissing the Boring Company, Nuerolink, SolarCity and the Hyperloop, among others that went nowhere. Not that his sucess rate is anything to be embarrassed by, but his announcement alone doesn't lead to me expecting anything to ever be commercially available.