this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2023
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He does indeed have a history of paying his way into looking like a visionary and/or an engineer. He bought into Tesla in early 2004, it was founded in mid 2003.
His comfort zone was convincing people to give him money for one really ambitious thing, and then using that money to achieve some other thing (that no one would have given him money for) that is sort of on the way, but which has commercial value to him.
For example, he has repeatedly said his companies will deliver full self-driving cars by dates that have passed - and convinced investors to get him in a position to compete with companies like Toyota, promised a 'hyperloop' and got funding to compete with other horizontal drilling companies, promised to send people to mars and got to compete with other satellite technology companies.
So making big promises paid off for him. For the investors, in terms of long term value, they might have been better off investing in existing companies he ended up competing with.
But I suspect he is now outside his comfort zone, and might not even realise how far out of his depth he is.
https://time.com/6203815/elon-musk-flaws-billionaire-visions/ the Hyperloop only exists to thunderfuck public transportation projects. Stop giving him benefit of the doubt.
I give him something: the hyperloop proposal was sophisticated enough that several independent teams across the world worked on refinement and even started prototypes.
If he actually did it as a ruse, he must have been smarter than all those people ... which would be a bit concerning.
Get real, mountains of money and one of the best PR teams (if you reply saying he didn't have a PR team I have a bridge to sell ya) in the world is what made that happen, not an idea the majority of people involved in the sector agreeing with it. In fact if you look back you'll find most actual public transportation experts advocated AGAINST the hyperloop as a concept.
Adam Something has a lot of videos explaining how stupid his ideas are, including the whole plan to "go to Mars". They are all grifts.