I also can certainly imagine a better world if just one thing were different about Musk. In my mind that is different than saying that he hasn’t already made a positive mark on the world.
All that said, he is acting like an entitled asshole and it is pissing me off because I really want him to be a better person than that.
That’s a little unfair to South Africa
Anyway, I am happy for Elon Musk to express himself but my advice to him would be: Remember You Are Not OK Right Now
But by making you feel better, does it not allow you to stick with the status quo? If you WANT for things to be terribly different, you need to live “different”. i.e. make some sort of continued effort to change the world around you. I’m not saying you aren’t, as I have no idea what you do with your life. I’m just pointing out that feeling better often equates to feeling less urgency to change things yourself.
One thing I fully believe: the majority of what Musk does will not be for the benefit of humankind. His space fantasy is Elysium, not Star Trek. The long term viability of the human race at this point depends far more on leveling off population growth, educating the majority of the world so they can have more control over their own lives, and some form of a more equitable wealth system. None of which Musk is really working towards from what I can see.
Battery development is hot (I think the reasons should be obvious), with or without Tesla.
Um, I don’t know this from personal experience but evidence points to many South Africans being black.
NASA flew to the moon.
I see electric cars every day. I’ve never seen a Tesla. They are too expensive for normalish pekple. They used Hitachi batteries until recently, didn’t they?
Musk is a narcissistic self publicist throwing lawsuits about like Thiele. PayPal are like the motherlode of evil billionaire bros.
The song is dated, but I still feel like it’s pretty clear in context that it’s specifically about white Afrikaners.
Fuck you, Musk. Haven’t you heard of the concept of punching down? Who the fuck is going to sue a billionaire in a system where victory in civil suits goes to the most expensive lawyers?
Nonsense.
Those aren’t Camry sales numbers, but nothing to scoff at.
Car manufacturers will sell whatever people will buy – they don’t care what propels it. The past problems have been around economics and manufacturing challenges. These aren’t things Tesla solved. Chevrolet and Nissan have been selling decent mass market EVs since around 2010. Tesla is good at making very expensive and overcomplicated status symbol EVs.
Tesla was founded without him. Renewable energy has been on a downslope in prices since some time in the 70s. The maker of the bestselling model of electric car, Nissan, released their first electric car almost a decade before Tesla. Considering that was a lead acid battery, it isn’t surprise that the cars were garbage until the battery tech got a bit better, which had a lot more to do with the growth of cell phones than Tesla. They made a good car, but it is silly to pretend none of this stuff was happening without everyone’s favorite unstable billionaire.
It’s like the serial killer thing. We hear mostly about the ones who money fucks up. The ones quietly living a nice life don’t make the news.
(and you’ll never hear about the most successful serial killers either…)
There may be more than 300000 Leafs (Leaves?) out there but they still only sell at a trickle and mainly only in places where you get a rebate. Even the Bolt is only selling meh. People will buy EVs if they are compelling enough and Tesla is the first to have shown how much better they actually are. How much you want to drive them more than the alternative rather than settling for the “smart” choice.
If there is no compelling EV on the market, people won’t be buying it so there is no market to bother designing a compelling EV for. The EV market existed before Musk but I believe his drive and vision has blown it wide open and shown it can be 100X larger.
Most cars are purchased as status symbols with flimsy self delusional tissue paper reasons why we need them. I think it’s great that there is an EV in that niche.
Maybe a model 3 is still to rich for you. I certainly feel that way but I think we are 5+years ahead of where we would be without this guy and that’s a big deal to me.
Perhaps the company was founded without him but please don’t expect me to believe that they would have charted nearly as ambitious a course without him.
Sure the fundamentals would have continued as they have and eventually some other person or company would have stepped into the markets but I think you are missing the fact that Musk has driven this process to accelerate. The equipment they are selling is just that much better than anything else on the market with experts recently describing the model 3 drive train as being “next-gen military-grade tech”.
This is not by accident and isn’t just because the fundamentals are improving. It’s because they are driving the technology that hard. Sure things would probably have gotten there without the push by Tesla with Musk but how much later?
My point is that the rate of change is greater than it would be I believe.
I also don’t see many other scale players in the grid scale battery storage market. That might just be my media diet but I think this is another place they are making the market.
I mean it’s not like he’s selling self-driving cars that are internet connected and filled with security bugs or anything.
They are better at marketing and presenting an aspirational product. They really aren’t that great. They are overcomplicated machines with an emphasis on form over function. A Juicero in car form. You seem to be suckered by the Cult of Musk though.
LOL WTF does that even mean? Makes me wonder who these “experts” are. It’s AC motors driving wheels, not a Mag-Lev.
So it sounds like your belief in Musk is more religious than based on anything he’s actually responsible for? Sounds familiar.
The purpose of the suit is to harass and discourage rather than win. The law can be used very easily to harass, and enough harassment on somebody who is simply on the thin edge anyway, well knowing that he is not authorized, will generally be sufficient to cause professional decease. If possible, of course, ruin him utterly.
— L. Ron Hubbard, The Scientologist, a Manual on the Dissemination of Material, 1955
That, or drilling giant holes under earthquake prone cities.
But if he doesn’t do something on par with creating a race of Gigeresque endoparasitoid horrors, then we got off easy.
