Is selling something knowing that it can never deliver on the promise a scam? I think so. P.T. Barnum hawked shows outside the tent that couldn't deliver inside. Theranos could never deliver. Nor Magic Leap. Nor Elon on his crazy promises!
Despite this (and SpaceX seems to be the company of his that he is least involved in on a day to day basis) he has made many documented false promises. Playing with rockets shouldn’t excuse that https://elonmusk.today/
SpaceX was the company he was most involved, and still is pretty involved. Just watch any factory tour he made, be it the 2005 ones or the new Texas ones. Or hear what people who worked with him talk.
And I can't trust that site. An example:
3,129 days since Elon Musk said Teslas would have 1,000 kilometer (621 mile) range within a year or two. (9/23/2015)
"My guess is probably we could break 1,000 kilometers within a year or two. I'd say 2017 for sure."
An altered quote taken out of context. Here what he actually said from the interview[1]:
Q: When will we break the 1000km range mark for an electric car?
M: A thousand kilometers, hmm. Well, it depends under what circumstances for a thousand kilometers. As it is, the record right now for Model S is 800 km. That is the furthest that anyone has driven a Model S...
Q: So we could be close?
M: Yeah, we're pretty close. Now, in order to do that they did drive at a relatively slow speed. So, you know, we're taking, I think they drove maybe at 40 or 50 km/h or something like that. But I think, my guess is probably we could break a 1000km within... a year or two?
Q: Okay, so within 2016 maybe even?
M: I say if you say 2017 I'd say 2017 for sure.
Teslas can self-drive from NY to LA all on their own? That's out, and everyone has it? That's what was promised.
If you sell someone a cherry pie to be delivered tomorrow, take nearly a decade, and end up handing them a bag of cherries and a dusting of flour with a label of "cherry pie" on it, you didn't meet your promises.
Do we credit calculus to Isaac Newton, the guy who invented it, or to Charles II, the random schmuck who happened to be king at the time? Why on earth should we give founders credit for work done by other people?
Musk is a lazy ketamine addict. He doesn't do anything other than tweet at himself from his alt accounts and fail upward, disproving meritocracy in the process.
They can, and they should. Sometimes it is done. But to me it feels that many times a disproportionate amount of credit goes to founders/CEOs. People even fighting over whether for example Elon is successful or not, and completely disregarding everyone else in the organization. Or course the organizations are complex, but also mostly opaque - we do not know who does what.
When has Elon said that the failures are the faults of his employees? Hell, he seldom claims that it's his success. Every Starship test flight he's congratulated the team for a job well done.
It's the random people constantly looking for excuses to not believe his successes ("he doesn'thave much to do with SpaceX" or "he stole Tesla"), as well as idiotic article headlines ("Elon Musk's SpaceX does X" etc) that have made up those ideas.
- he can identify incredibly good companies and products, and (usually) is able to lift them up, fund them, and leave them mostly be. It's not him running Tesla day-to-day (nor was tesla started by him), nor is it him running SpaceX, nor...
- at the same time, everything that he's involved in directly is just abysmally stupid
Your post may or may not be correct, but does not answer the question in the comment you were responding to and has zero supporting arguments for both assertions you make.
I watched a "locked in" man use a computer mouse with a brain implant in 2002. It remains to be seen if this is actually better than what's been done before other than torturing a bunch of monkeys running needless experiments.
Also I doubt Musk had much to do with the brain implant other than being someone to push people forward and being a bag of money for it. Did he design the implant? Did he insert it? Did he code it?
Agreed, Musk seems to have bought and paid for mostly legitimate companies, and most "broken promises" seem to come from how desperate he is for attention on Twitter, often at the reputational detriment of said companies. If anything, he's just lucky his first big break company was PayPal, not Theranos.
Probably most people are sad he went from cool sci-fi CEO to weird divorced dad energy on bird website CEO.
3,129 days since Elon Musk said Teslas would have 1,000 kilometer (621 mile) range within a year or two. (9/23/2015)
"My guess is probably we could break 1,000 kilometers within a year or two. I'd say 2017 for sure."
An altered quote taken out of context. Here what he actually said from the interview[1]:
Q: When will we break the 1000km range mark for an electric car?
M: A thousand kilometers, hmm. Well, it depends under what circumstances for a thousand kilometers. As it is, the record right now for Model S is 800 km. That is the furthest that anyone has driven a Model S...
Q: So we could be close?
M: Yeah, we're pretty close. Now, in order to do that they did drive at a relatively slow speed. So, you know, we're taking, I think they drove maybe at 40 or 50 km/h or something like that. But I think, my guess is probably we could break a 1000km within... a year or two?
Q: Okay, so within 2016 maybe even?
M: I say if you say 2017 I'd say 2017 for sure.
But one hypermiler reporting a long range under perfect conditions is exactly what he described at length while making that claim. It was pretty clear to me. And that was exactly what we got in 2017.
If one wants to lie by twisting what he said, what happened or putting purposefully out of context to gain clicks or drive up hate against the guy, that is another thing. You should not do that. Nowhere he said what the site or you are implying.
I'm tired how people are getting radicalized because they hear absurd things ("pizzagate") and instead of doubting it they believe it and become outraged. If you actually hear people talking, they are usually much more reasonable than what they seem if you just take a few of the most negative phrases out of context.
It takes a lot of effort to undo fake news. A few more examples from that website:
"Rocket Fuel Solves Climate Change", an absurd extrapolation on what was probably a tweet about ISRU for Mars.
And this juxtaposition that makes you think he just sold what was paid to them, when instead it is 10% of what they had bought previously if you actually follow the link:
Hodl [Link]
1,120 days since Elon Musk promised to hold bitcoin instead converting it. (3/24/2021)
"Bitcoin paid to Tesla will be retained as Bitcoin, not converted to fiat currency."
Elon Musk in a Tweet
1,087 days since Elon Musk converted $272 million to fiat currency. (4/26/2021)
As reported by Nate DiCamillo in yahoo! finance
You might argue that the second move goes against the spirit of what he said in the tweet and all that, but you have to agree with me that this site is being purposefully deceitful on how it is presenting this to promote hate and radicalize more the people.
Theranos faked blood test results. This is not the same thing as ‘being slow at delivering self driving’ to quote one of the other people in this thread.
Not getting treated for a disease you have, or taking medication for a disease you don’t have, versus buying something that wasn’t yet as good as the product video.
People have died due to someone believing that a Tesla could handle normal driving conditions when it could not. That doesn’t seem like an incredibly huge gap in terms of impact.
There's certainly a difference in terms of the possible severity of the impact of the two things, but that doesn't speak to whether or not they're both scam behavior.
If you're claiming things about your product or service that aren't true (even if they may become true eventually), and especially if you're faking evidence to support your lies, you're scamming.
They're all scammers.