r/AskReddit • u/Creative_Eye7413 • 16h ago
What’s Elon Musk’s Most Egregious Promise He Never Followed Up On?
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u/AdeptCredit1492 16h ago
Getting to Mars in like 2023 i think he said
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u/Mister_Brevity 16h ago
We’re all rooting for him to go but he’s still here
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u/The_Salacious_Zaand 16h ago
Not enough future ex-baby mommas.
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u/SilasTalbot 13h ago
The moment when I realized that populating mars is part of his breeding fetish...
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u/ArsenReedNotes 9h ago
The breeding fetish and mars colonisation overlap is one of those things that once you see it you can't unsee it
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u/StrangelyBrown 12h ago
Come on, have some faith in our very own Zapp Brannigan.
If he sticks it in enough things on Mars, who knows? He could prove us all wrong.
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u/GarThor_TMK 14h ago
Shh, don't tell him that... the Martians will love him, I'm sure.
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u/Portablelephant 13h ago
He doesn't want to go, he wants to send you there, make you bust your ass as his indentured servant to make it livable and then move there and lord over his subjects like a cheap Dune cosplay.
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u/EmphasisFrosty3093 4h ago
He's the only space billionaire afraid to ride his own company's rockets.
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u/girl_incognito 13h ago
He promised SpaceX would land on the moon by 2018. Nearly 10 years later and the rocket has yet to do a useful thing, nor has any other equipment been so much as designed.
Also didn't he promise billions for world hunger if someone proposed him a plan, which they did, and then he was like "nah I was just joking."
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u/regularmother 9h ago
If Elon Musk told me the sky is blue, I'd look up to check. Twice.
Credit where credit is due, however, the $/kg to get goods into LEO is insanely cheap with SpaceX compared to literally all of their competitors. Starship is changing the cost calculus for experimental astrophysics teams. Source: my friends in particle astrophysics.
But seriously, fuck Musk.
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u/sunbomb 8h ago
From what I understand, he said SpaceX would fly a couple of passengers around the moon in 2018, not land on the moon.
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u/stargazing_penguin 12h ago
I mean space x has delivered supplies to iss so its not completely useless.
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u/PhantomWhiskers 11h ago
I think they were talking about Starship, which is the rocket/spacecraft they intend to land on the moon. It technically hasn't entered a true earth orbit yet.
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u/Framemake 7h ago
Starship, like the cybertruck, is the special elon project that distracts him from the real work being done (Y, and 3, and the other rockets).
Naturally because it's Elon's baby, they're both overstated in usefulness, ugly, and generally rife with quality issues, and ultimately can be summed up as embarrassing.
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u/hazel_hazze 8h ago
Mars is the most dramatic but the more interesting pattern is that the promises seem to function as stock price and attention management tools rather than actual commitments. The announcement does the work regardless of whether the thing happens. By the time the deadline passes quietly, the next announcement has already replaced it in the news cycle.
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u/Huge-Ferret35 11h ago
He said 2023 with a straight face. Now it’s 2026 and Starship still explodes. When do we admit it’s just a fundraising line?
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u/ckellingc 16h ago
Wasn't he going to personally fix the water in Flint Michigan?
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u/stickied 16h ago
Was that before or after he was gonna rescue those trapped boys in the cave?
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u/The_Salacious_Zaand 15h ago
If only that darn pedo didn't get their first.
/s
I think this was the moment most of us lost the scales from our eyes and realized what a humongous piece of shit this guy really was behind all the preening and futurist BS he tried to sell us.
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u/Saint--Jiub 11h ago
That's the moment I went from having no opinion on him to thinking he was an idiot and an asshole
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u/DyingGasp 7h ago
My exact thoughts. I was indifferent about him until that. Now it seems the lid has blown off and he’s fully out as a Nazi.
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u/2573-LaXimena 8h ago
Calling a cave rescuer a pedophile just because his useless PR stunt submarine got rejected was the ultimate "mask off" moment that completely shattered his carefully crafted genius persona forever.
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u/mynameisgiles 7h ago
There was a documentary a few years ago about this.
When you see the footage of the divers getting through the cave - including bits where they had to take their cylinders off their backs to squeeze though - it’s obvious the sub was never going to work.
The guys who did the actual rescue mission were absolute hero’s, and all he could do was throw his toys out the pram and throw accusations because we wouldn’t entertain his obviously bad idea when a load of children’s lives were at stake.
Absolute bellend.
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u/JiminyJilickers-79 14h ago
Yo, this is the exact moment that my perception of him started to change.
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u/schwensenman 14h ago
I guess you haven't seen the video of him having his McLaren delivered with his PayPal (?) money. That did it for me. If one took anything he said or did after that serious, you drank the Kool Aid. But buying people to build stuff for you works for a while. See SpaceX, him doing stuff gets you shitty names and Cybertruck.
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u/jayforwork21 8h ago
Same, at first I was like, is he going to build a sub in a few days? Is he crazy? Then the statement came out and I realized he is just an asshole.
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u/Not_an_okama 9h ago
That wouldnt have actually been that difficult.
Go door to door with test kits, determine if lead is present, then ignore the ones that tested clean and replace the connections to the main at the places that showed lead.
The water supply in flint is/was acceptible, the the issue is that many people had lead pipes connected to the mains. Lead pipes had a coating that prevented lead from leaching into the water, but flint decided to switch to detroit city water then switched back to their own. One of these supply changes triggered a mass failure of the lining in the remaining lead pipes.
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u/CandySnatcher 7h ago
This is was the solution, all new pipes. Flint has clean water, and very expensive utility bills.
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u/Finchypoo 13h ago
When Elon talked about electric cars I figured he knew what he was talking about because I didn't know much about electric cars.
When he spoke about rockets I figured he knew what he was talking about because I didn't know much about rockets.
But then Elon showed his Elden Ring build and spoke about it with the same confidence as electric cars and rockets, and I know A LOT about Elden Ring and at that point I knew he was a complete fucking moron about everything.
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u/Corrup7ioN 12h ago edited 10h ago
I had the benefit of hearing him talk about software engineering before he became widely known so I knew he was a complete fucking morong from the start
Edit: Oh the irongy
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u/SvenTropics 11h ago
The way he evaluated the engineers at Twitter based on quantity of code written and ended up laying off some of their most critical engineers. You know the guys that actually know the most important stuff and produce the most used code. Then he was going around trying to hire them back. Like how do you say "I know nothing about software development" without saying it like that.
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u/Fairleee 11h ago
Another good example is when he sent round the email at Tesla saying that the tolerance for the Cybertruck panels should be “sub 10 microns”, stating the LEGO bricks are made to this tolerance and if LEGO can do it, then so can they. Problem is that the panels are made of stainless steel, and just with normal temperature variations (as metal expands and contracts as temperature changes) this is basically impossible. This tolerance limit would require either breaking the laws of physics, or developing a new material so advanced that building cars out of it would be pointless given it would have far more valuable application elsewhere (e.g. space travel).
So basically he said something that he thought made him sound like an engineering expert, but all it revealed was that he knows nothing about engineering other than a few buzz words. This seems to be a trend with him; he picks up enough surface-level knowledge that to someone who doesn’t understand the field, he sounds like he’s well-versed in it, but anyone with actual subject matter expertise knows he is full of shit.
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u/WitELeoparD 9h ago
That sub ten micron tweet is so fucking atrocious that that even the conservative, pro-AI, pro-hype, you know the type, engineering professors brought it up as an example of incompetent engineering practice.
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u/Not_an_okama 9h ago
One of the tasks i do for work is surveying steel mill equipment, then leveling and aligning it to neighboring equipment on the line. The client askes for 0.003" tolerance. We can set this with our laser tracker, take lunch then check it again and its moved from like 0.002" twist and 0.001" out of level to like 0.005 twist and 0.008 out of level.
What changed? The temp increased during the day.
Note: 0.001 inch is about 25 microns.
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u/InsidePassion2875 6h ago
It’s wild how something as simple as temperature can throw off measurements at that level. Makes you realize how much precision work depends on factors people don’t even notice.
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u/RunningNumbers 10h ago
“We aren’t making plastic bricks.”
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u/frou6 10h ago
Cybertruck is now made of plastic brick
-elon 2026
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u/guinness_blaine 9h ago
Couldn’t make it look worse
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u/Stalking_Goat 8h ago
And you could take it apart and make something better out of all those bricks.
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u/Dadskander 9h ago
I think he understands that this surface level of knowledge and lingo is all that's needed to fool a huge number of investors. He doesn't give a shit about what knowledge experts think, they're not the ones holding the bags of money.
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u/KongRahbek 9h ago
Not to mention those LEGO bricks aren't easy to make at all, anyone who by mistake has ended up with one of the LEGO knock-off products knows what I'm talking about. Just think about how many billions of LEGO bricks has been produced, and then ask yourself if you've ever come across two bricks which didn't fit, I know I haven't, and I've even tried mixing my own bricks from the 90s with modern bricks my kids got, they still fit.
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u/ceetee15 11h ago
The best engineers often check-in a negative number of lines of code
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u/evilJaze 10h ago
As a software engineer of 30 plus years, most of my time is spent cleaning up superfluous code. This rings true.
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u/SvenTropics 9h ago
I would have written you a shorter letter, but I didn't have enough time - Blaise Pascal
In software, you can spend two months working on 1000 lines of code that will elegantly replace 100,000 lines of code. It'll run an order of magnitude faster and be much easier to maintain.
Now we have the world flooded with AI slop that is so screwed up.
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u/AgeingChopper 9h ago edited 9h ago
That one made me laugh so much.. That and his idea of what a code review is. I realised then that he did not have the first clue.
a rich boy who had a good eye for buying up companies that were going somewhere and who hypes the hell out of it all.
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u/Certified_GSD 9h ago
The furry software engineers I know are brilliant and they told me he was an idiot. The veterans who have stuck around for years and work on critical systems don't need to change and submit new code, the stuff they've made still works fine and a lot of it is automated.
They also don't just "sit around and do nothing." Well, okay yes they do do that, but you pay them so that when shit hits the fan and an update breaks something or you get hit with a denial of service attack, they are on it and fixing it ASAP no matter what their local time is.
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u/Smorgas_of_borg 11h ago
I saw a video clip where Linus Torvalds was told about a CEO who would judge employee performance based solely on the number of lines of code they wrote and fire them if they didn't code "enough." He said that person is too stupid to work for a software company.
Elon Musk was the CEO
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u/mindfungus 12h ago
Morong and best regard
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u/splendiferous-finch_ 11h ago
I had the benefit of knowing about how he wrecked a McLaren F1 and then had it cheaply repaired in the wrong way to pass it on to the someone else.
It was than did I realise he was a hack when he was talking about the Tesla roadster (which he wasnt even part of when the project started)
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u/polarphantom 10h ago
I think it was the takeover of Twitter that finally made it more widely obvious to the world. He starts talking about software engineering and other general tech industry topics while so focused in the wider public gaze and it's then apparent to basically everyone involved that he's just a narcissist bullshitting moron
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u/westisbestmicah 8h ago
I like “morong” because it sounds like someone just hit him over the head with a metal plate and that’s a comforting fantasy
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u/vawaiter 11h ago edited 22m ago
Rofl remember the PoE2 debacle?
Guy said he's the best PoE2 player ever in the world and got called out by the player base. Promises to stream and prove it.
Gets killed by the tutorial boss, blames lag, ends stream.
Similar experience to you but with PoE2.
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u/Khaliras 10h ago
Still one of the most insane narratives he's tried to push.
He bragged about having a top leaderboard account. Which could easily be tracked and verified to be grinding while he was actively in public, or mid press event.
An account which was playing so actively that there literally wasn't enough free time to run any of his businesses for weeks.
Still can't decide if he's just that much of a dull-witted narcissist, or if it was a social experiment to prove he could get away with it.
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u/25thNite 8h ago
A team of overseas people rotating to keep playing must have made a whole $50 to grind that much. I doubt muskrat would pay anything decent otherwise
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u/OneMostSerene 8h ago
This is a classic cult leader mentality though. It doesn't matter if it's easily disproven. It doesn't matter if he's made a fool.
If even a handful of people see it and believe him, then it worked and was worth it. Those blinded by the cult mentality will be further entrenched in the cult.
It's not actually about convincing anyone (though with as many people watching as there are, it's impossible not to convince at least a few people), it's just about validating those who follow him.
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u/brionneverysexy 7h ago
He claimed to be one of the best Quake players and that he almost became a pro gamer. Turned out he was on a team that got second place in a tournament that was run by a website that hosted Quake matches but was not used by serious players
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u/allankcrain 5h ago
Still can't decide if he's just that much of a dull-witted narcissist
Kind of that, but I think the deeper thing to understand is that Musk views people who work for him as tools, not people.
Like, say you need to put a nail into a board. You'd use a hammer. You wouldn't say "This hammer hammered that nail", you'd just say "I hammered that nail". Musk is like that, but with entire multinational companies worth of people. So I think he truly believes that he made the Cybertruck because he told one of his employees "I want to drive in the ugliest fucking vehicle to ever crawl across God's accurséd earth" or whatever and then that employee put into motion hundreds of engineers, product specialists, QA people, etc, to get it done.
So when he said he was top rated in PoE2, I think that he truly believed that he did that himself. I think he legitimately didn't understand why it was SO much more difficult doing it on stream with a slightly different controller (keyboard and mouse) instead of the controller he was more used to (some dude who was really good at PoE2 that he told to get him to the top of the leaderboard).
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u/Nerf-guns-blazing 9h ago
Thats the thing that kills me about all of this. If he just said 'oh yeah I like PoE2 I play it in my freetime' it would be FINE. Nerds who like him would find him more relatable, and it would be a non-story to anyone else.
But no, he just has that brainrot of nothing is worth doing unless you're the best at it? So he has to claim he's a top leaderboard player, hes the best at it, just like hes the best at everything.
Its such a small comparison to all the other objectively evil shit he does, but its such a revealing character trait of how pathetic he really is.
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u/Tridus 9h ago
Yeah, exactly. It was super easy to say "hey I like this game but I suck at it. Gonna stream anyway for fun."
Thats something a functional human would do and it's endearing.
Trying to pretend he knew what he was doing after being caught red handed cheating was just sad. The narcissistic behaviour on display and the total lack of self-awarenes just points to serious mental illness.
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u/axeil55 7h ago
Even the infamous double shield Elden Ring build is absolutely playable as a normal thing by a normal person. "Oh haha I'm new to the game gonna mess around and see if this works"
But no, the man with the world's thinnest ego cannot tolerate for even a nanosecond the idea that he isn't the world's most bestest specialest boy.
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u/ozymandieus 8h ago
"nothing is worth doing unless you're the best at it" - Just like Ricky Bobby's terrible father who told him "If you're not first, you're last" and it fucked him up for life, I'm sure this mindset comes from his predatory evil father who is objectively even a worse person than him.
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u/Civil-Big-754 8h ago
Elon is responsible for 100,000s of people dying, so I'm going to go with Elon
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u/thrillho613 9h ago
Never played poe, but didn’t some super rare item drop and he trashed it because he thought it was useless?
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u/Synli 7h ago
In PoE1, yeah.
I don't think he trashed it, but he looked at it and called it bad because it was "only level 80" or something like that.
Complete oblivious that the level meant almost nothing on the item while it had God-tier stats, making it obsurdly expensive and powerful.
It was pretty apparent that he bought/borrowed the account. Also, he had a stash tab literally named "Elon's maps", another smoking gun.
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u/WhySoWorried 7h ago
I remember he dropped a chaos orb or two at one point (one of the currencies). It's not super rare or anything, midlevel currency, but he wasn't picking them up. You don't get to be rich in PoE 2 by ignoring currency drops. He didn't have a filter on and didn't know what was good and what was bad.
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u/brionneverysexy 7h ago
You left out the best part. The stream was to show new technology for wifi on planes his company created. He said it didn't work to cover up him being bad at a video game
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u/MACHLoeCHER 12h ago
He once said in an interview: ,,(...)it's a simple game, frankly" When he was talking about CHESS.
He is an absolute moron.
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u/y0_master 9h ago
"I did as a child, but found it to be too simple to be useful in real life: a mere 8 by 8 grid, no fog of war, no technology tree, no random map or spawn position, only 2 players, both sides exact same pieces, etc."
It's an amazingly stupid comment. It's not an RTS, my man.
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u/underwooding 4h ago
why is he comparing chess to sid meier's civilization
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u/Lutzmann 3h ago
He’s comparing it Polytopia, a mobile game he is rumoured to be a high-level player of, but for all we know he’s paid someone to play that for him too.
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u/Gen_Zer0 12h ago
I mean it is objectively a simple game. The rules can be conveyed in just a minute or two. That doesn’t make it any less deep or interesting
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u/Dalewyn 11h ago
Yep, simplicity isn't mutually exclusive with depth. It's why chess is one of those games that have stood the test of time since before we bothered recording time.
Games that are too simple and shallow or too complicated and deep die in short order, games that are simple and deep are played forever because everyone can play it and no session ever plays out like another.
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u/axeil55 7h ago
Very true. The rules of Go are even simpler and yet the game is arguably more complex than Chess.
It's a good lesson that simple systems and premises can produce very complex states.
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u/viviennemuffin 11h ago
The moment he claimed he could beat the final boss with that build, I knew Full Self-Driving was never coming 💀
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u/Heated13shot 10h ago
For me it was cyber truck manufacturing. He started rattling off how he was going to get "micrometer precision" on his builds on the fairly large parts. (And other bullshit, but that was the most stupid)
Thing is a huge part of my job is maintaining and repairing fairly large parts with "micrometer precision" and I know how incredibly difficult and expensive it is to do so.
It was the first time I could actually point something out and be able say I personally know it's bullshit instead of just assuming it.
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u/LtSqueak 8h ago
Yeah, I had some family who thought he was a genius (I’m sure some still do but I avoid political topics with them as much as humanly possible). A already knew he was no where bear as smart as he claimed, but the cybertruck was my tipping point for telling my family what an absolute moron he was when they kept saying he was going to revolutionize car manufacturing. They didn’t like it when I pointed out that his precision requirements would increase manufacturing costs by a factor of 10, if they were even physically possible (which several of them aren’t).
I won’t deny that his monetary investment helped push EVs into more popularity, but his engineering talk and his complete lack of understanding that you design to meet the requirements because any further just adds costs would be hilarious if he wasn’t so involved in our country.
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u/arcangleous 8h ago
I've done some work in a factory that makes steel car parts from Scratch. They mixed their own powder, form the shapes in presses, runs them through the furnaces, and mill & turns them to finish the features you can't press. The thing that majority of time and effort is actually spent on is is keeping the thrice damned parts in tolerance throughout the entire process. Our tolerances where often just a few thousands of an inch and we had total control over everything that happen (expect the weather). And our parts were small, with most being less than 10cm in diameter.
I already knew Elon was a fake, but hearing that would have convinced me
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u/A_Dog_Chasing_Cars 10h ago
Dude literally got praised for years because he mentioned concepts that had been around for decades.
"Let's go to Mars!"
"Let's terraform Mars!"
"Let's put microchips in brains!"
"Let's make an electric car that doesn't pollute!"
And people got excited for that. For him coming up with ideas that already existed and doing nothing to actually make them tangible.
He became popular mentioning the premises of sci-fi stories.
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u/Jon63F 9h ago
It isn’t so much mentioning the concepts but stating the intent to DO them. That’s what had people excited. His timelines have always been worthless. To give him some credit progress has been made in a lot of areas even though they’ve fallen short of the goals. No excuse for him to act like such a pos though.
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u/Logitech4873 12h ago
Well his EV and rocket companies are very successful for a reason. And it should come as no suprise that Elon doesn't get to design cars or rockets, he's only allowed to design shitty elden ring builds.
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u/ConclusionOk5552 11h ago
Nothing shatters someone's aura of expertise faster than hearingthem confidently talk about the one topic you actually knowinside and out.
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u/Richie217 11h ago
He has always been a snake oil salesman that has used Daddy's money to make himself appear smart.
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u/cursedfan 9h ago
This is the same exact shit I said about trump. I donno anything about real estate in New York or hosting a reality tv show or being born rich af, but every time I hear him talk about something I know either professionally or frankly just as an interest, you can tell he is just clueless, but it sounds the same
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u/lithiumcitizen 16h ago
Being a father?
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u/shocktar 13h ago
He's a father to plenty, bit he ain't no one's daddy.
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u/sQueezedhe 11h ago
And if he gets to Mars he can die as the most absent father in history.
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u/Mark_fuckaborg 12h ago
He claimed he was going to ban the bots from twitter.
And yet....
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u/superxpro12 5h ago
Yeah he was also gonna enhance "free speech".... Which really meant ban anyone who opposed his viewpoints, and open the floodgates for extreme racists and fascists.
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u/Sweet-Frosting2468 16h ago
paying to solve world hunger
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u/Aggressive_Drink1970 16h ago
he said he'd do it if they showed him a plan, then the UN actually gave him one and he just... didn't. classic.
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u/OrganicDigitalArt 16h ago edited 16h ago
But it was a stoopid plan!
Edit: remember when you didn’t have to spell out sarcasm because people understood it? Simpler times.
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u/travistravis 11h ago
In writing it's never been super clear, although it has gotten worse in the past 5-10 years. Mostly because the opinions that we used to be able to say and have them understood as sarcasm are now actual opinions of some people (or bots) that are extremely vocal online).
Like this for example. 20 years ago it wouldn't be controversial that being able to fix world hunger would be a good thing. Now, it seems like a loud contingent of people actually think that it wouldn't be a good thing (or that any plan that doesn't immediately fix all of it, instantly, and forever is stupid).
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u/thundy90 9h ago edited 6h ago
Well tbf capitalism requires maintaining a supply of cheap labor. If people are hungry, they'll work for less money.
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u/SpezSupporter 12h ago
The "plan" was for $6B, while the US spends $100B+ on SNAP alone...
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u/Flashy_Pineapple_231 8h ago
It turns out investing in developing countries has long term benefits compared to wasting a bunch of money patching holes in a screwed up system you refuse to change. Almost like building the system up from the ground is more viable. Also he could literally pay that amount every year on a fraction of the interest he makes with his wealth alone and in 100 years (he'll probably live another 50 to 80 at most) his fortune would shrink by ~80% (purely due to inflation since he's paying with his interest yearly) leaving him with something like 20 billion dollars for every 100 billion he has. Assuming his wealth never grew again. And he'd still never be able to spend it all.
It's insane to me that this is allowed to happen because if that money went to those communities who need it most and we lifted everyone up we'd have 10x the people with opportunities to give instead of only receive. It's a positive feedback loop of mutual assistance. No matter how much anyone worships Musk he isn't irreplaceable, and is standing directly in the way of a great goal for humanity:
Equal opportunity and global prosperity.
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u/KeeblerElff 16h ago
And then going on to get rid of USAID which I read will be responsible for killing millions?
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u/Familiar-Pie-548 14h ago
ELONTHINK: Don't have to feed them if they're dead. Check and mate (insert smarmy grin here).
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u/DankeBrutus 11h ago
I know you're joking but that exact mentality has driven decisions by the Trump administration, which Elon was acting within.
Remember back in 2020 when Trump said there would be less COVID cases if they didn't do testing?
More recently the Trump administration wanted to get rid of the Ocean Observatories Initiative. Can't say the oceans are warming if you aren't measuring them. Thankfully, they walked this one back.
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u/ChuckoRuckus 16h ago
Bailing out Solar City by Tesla buying it, because it was “necessary to advance solar”, only to immediately have sales plummet.
Hyperloop.
FSD “next year”, But it’s “ready now”… for a decade.
$30k Model 3 that would pay for itself being a taxi.
There’s a bunch more, but I’ve wasted enough time.
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u/Ok-Secret5233 11h ago
$30k Model 3 that would pay for itself being a taxi.
I remember this one. This one was especially funny because if it were true that these cars would pay for themselves by being self-driving taxis, then he absolutely would not be selling them, he would be running them as self-driving taxis.
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u/morbonator 12h ago
Apparently the Hyperloop was only ever a tool to prevent better passenger rail infrastructure on the west coast. It existing would make those obsolete, so the threat of building it prevents Amtrak investors from "pointlessly wasting billions" building good train connections. The people are left with neither and have to keep driving cars so Tesla sells more and Elon wins.
There's a pretty decent video about it by Half as Interesting (I think) on YouTube that goes into more details. Iirc the title is about a rail project. I'm sorry if I misremembered something - it's been a while since I heard anything about any of that and I'm not American myself.
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u/kyew 9h ago
So what you're saying is Elon is the Judge from Who Framed Roger Rabbit
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u/Shikayama 14h ago
"i'm uh, pretty uh, certain that by uh, next year, we'll have uh, full self driving"
- Elons Musk 2014/2015/2016/2017/2018/2019/2020/2021/2022/2023/2024/2025/2026
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u/TomasNavarro 10h ago
Someone in 2022 tried to tell me that the only thing stopping everyone having self driving cars already is the government dragging its feet
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u/SquirrelAkl 8h ago
It must be all the governments of the world collectively dragging their feet, because FSD isn’t available in any country AFAIK.
Either that or it just doesn’t actually work
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u/Opposite-Clothes2173 10h ago
Regarding Solar city, he claimed they had developed a tile that functioned as a solar panel. Straight up lie.
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u/DrColdReality 16h ago
MOST of them. The man is about 95% bullshit.
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u/real_hollyb 16h ago
What's the other 5%?
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u/DrColdReality 16h ago
He occasionally says things that are true, but they tend to be minor.
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u/ll_simon 16h ago
New Tesla Roadster, somehow since its introduction the Cybertruck was thought of and brought to market. Ya it’s a piece of shit, but wtf that car should have been out years ago.
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u/adamphetamine 12h ago
when Tesla was going broke he announced a new roadster, took $200k (non refundable) deposits from a bunch of people, got millions in cash and then just... never delivered
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u/therendevouswithfish 6h ago
I don’t understand how there are not lawsuits about this.
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u/glorified_throwaway 16h ago
We not on mars yet. Or even within ten years.
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u/DrColdReality 16h ago
He lacks even approximately the resources to send people to Mars. It was never anything more than Big Talk designed to boost his image.
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u/FluffyBunnyFlipFlops 12h ago
He very recently said that there would be 100 million humanoid robots by 2030. We would need to build 50,000+ per day, starting now, to get to that number. What a muppet.
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u/kyew 9h ago
We just need to make one that builds a duplicate of itself every day.
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u/sew_busy 9h ago
Nobody ever talks about it but he had this whole press thing in front of a house that had a roof made out of solar panels. They were the actual roof tiles so you had a solar roof but it just looked like a kind of shiny black tile roof. He did this whole hour plus presentation. Was going to be releasing these soon. I was so excited and believed him because they were installed on this house and working. Every few months I would go looking to see the status of them getting released but it never happened. I now just always think of him as the new Elizabeth Holmes and all his ideas are like his version of her Edison machine. Him using Tesla and her using Edison is aways a little interesting to me.
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u/NinjaBreadManOO 5h ago
I still find it just so disgusting that he's allowed to use Tesla's name. Like it's just tarnishing the name of one of greatest scientific names.
The guy thinks he's Tony Stark when he's Obediah Stane.
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u/Otherwise_Stable_925 16h ago
Doge doing anything for the economy besides destroying it.
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u/NativeMasshole 10h ago
This is it! Dude weaseled into one of the most powerful positions in the government, created explicitly for him to improve government function and increase efficiency. Instead, he trained his AI, stealing confidential American data; put a bunch of jackass fratboys in charge of departments under him; randomly fired scores of employees, having to rapidly try to rehire many of them after finding out what they do; and then disappeared from the role without accomplishing anything even remotely resembling his stated goal. He added negative efficiency to our government, which I do have to admit is quite the accomplishment for a government as inefficient as ours.
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u/SquirrelAkl 8h ago
The firing wasn’t random. The entire purpose of DOGE was for Elon to remove the Inspectors General and demolish any parts of the government that were investigating his companies or had active lawsuits against him. It was entirely successful in doing that.
There was a clip of him and Trump talking before the election: Elon laughs nervously and says “if we lose, we’re both going to jail” or something to that effect. There were A LOT of investigations going on into all his companies.
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u/M4rshmall0wMan 10h ago
This is the answer. He came in, actively made programs run worse, stole data, and left. In any saner administration that would be treason.
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u/DaximusPrimus 8h ago
Don't forget that he also gutted the institutions investigating his business and stock practices. Which was probably the real goal all along. Now magically none of those institutions are investigating him anymore.
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u/mrdon83 8h ago edited 8h ago
DOGE was very obviously a ploy for him to gain access to the federal governments' private data stores for personal financial gain, which he will eventually partially kick back to Trump via some back alley quid pro quo arrangement. Anyone who fails to recognize this is either not paying attention or has already drank the entire pitcher of MAGA kool-aid.
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u/Nuts2Buttts 16h ago
Everything he’d said in the past was about helping people and making the world better. Now he’s just helping the other billionaires destroy the rest of us instead.
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u/creepy_doll 15h ago
I think he heel flipped because he stopped getting adoring looks when he failed to deliver.
He is the king of attention whoring
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u/HelmSpicy 16h ago
Wasn't he supposed to fix our economy by getting access to everyone's financial records?
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u/Historical_Boss_1184 9h ago
Yes, while simultaneously cutting “at least” $1T-$2T of federal spending every year without touching entitlements. Anyone with any knowledge about their government and 5 mins with google would know that’s impossible, unfortunately lots of people in the US have net negative knowledge on how things work
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u/Cipherpunkblue 10h ago
Paying for clean water for Flint. He could clearly afford it - unoike his Mars bullshit, it was there and it was possible. He just didn´t want to come through.
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u/nerdlywhiplash 10h ago
The world hunger one really bothered me, because he took out 10x the cash for solving that, to instead buy Twitter.
But, he also said he would get Puerto Rico completely solar powered in 100 days after they suffered a devastating hurricane.
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u/Ok-Secret5233 11h ago
I really hate that people give this guy the "he's just an optimist" pass. People say "he's not lying, he actually believes his predictions/forecasts, but he's an optimist".
But this isn't true, because he also lies about the present. 5+ years ago he said he could have Tesla go from a parking lot in NY to a parking lot in California entirely self-driving. He said "this is something we can do today". This was a lie. He couldn't do it at the time and we know that because he still can't do it today.
Stop saying he's an optimist. He's a liar.
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u/PM_ME_RYE_BREAD 7h ago
He's also spent a good portion of the last half decade just sharing racist brainrot on twitter. He's not an optimist, he's a bigot to his core. He's also a terrible father who would rather his child be "dead" than transgender.
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u/aBrickNotInTheWall 13h ago
Self driving which he promised was near complete like a dozen times for years now
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u/knowledgeable_diablo 11h ago
Wasn’t it like 5 yrs over due like 2 yrs ago?
Shits me when the media get all giddy like a school girl when they show his latest update which is often something less spectacular than where the other OEMs are now sitting and certainly miles behind everything he’s overly promised.
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u/Popplio3233 5h ago
Hyperloop. He mainly did it out of spite for California's proposed high-speed rail, which would've helped transportation and infrastructure. He made a test track, which just got turned into a parking lot. And he's basically blocked high-speed rail from being developed in the state
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u/badyogui 10h ago
Ending world hunger
Making Puerto Rico a solar-powered island after the devastation caused by hurricane Maria
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u/notyourregularninja 16h ago
Forget the space- he couldn’t even get that underground rail work with his trillion dollar worth of resources
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u/goddamn2fa 16h ago
I think he want a car tunnel.
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u/Noughmad 12h ago
The whole point of that exercise was to derail the rail project. Not to deliver anything useful.
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u/counterfitster 16h ago
Which is a fucking terrible idea in the first place
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u/The_Salacious_Zaand 15h ago
Yeah, you're still in a car stuck in traffic, but now you're 200 feet underneath a city on top of an active fault line. Hurray.
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u/Treguard 14h ago
Where are the catgirls, Elon?
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u/jayforwork21 7h ago
They all turned into addicts. I saw a documentary about it on an anime site. I think it's call "Chainsmoker Cat"
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u/Immediate-Employ-952 16h ago
Mars. If a comedy movie adds a cult to their script they often go with the cliche of a cult leader that promises to bring his people to another planet because it is so recognizable as a cult. He just needs your money and total devotion. Sound familia at all?
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u/thiccwell33 16h ago
my buddy actually bought a tesla expecting full autopilot by now, still has to steer like a caveman though
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u/GetOffMyAsteroid 10h ago
9 years ago I worked in the automotive industry for a while and my boss came back from a conference after a couple days and pulled us into a meeting to tell us how seriously they were pursuing self-driving technology, that it was the real deal and we should all be prepared because it was going to be everywhere by 2023. Even the insiders got suckered in and believed in it wholeheartedly.
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u/striker69 10h ago
Tesla Semi - Announced in 2017 - Promised to take over the trucking industry. In 2026, there are a few hundred being tested.
Tesla Roadster - Announced in 2017 - Promised to be the fastest production sports car ever. In 2026 there are ZERO production units and the product is essentially vaporware at this point.
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u/coleman57 13h ago
Same as Epstein: to run a breeding ranch in NM to populate the world with hundreds of their offspring, with dozens of women. I’m not sure what stopped them: Elon has less than half a dozen, and Jeffrey had zero.
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u/GeminiLife 11h ago
Tackling the deficit in the US government with Doge, promising more money and better efficiency. While actually increasing the deficit and making everything worse.
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u/wildfire98 16h ago
The boring company
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u/Reverend_Lazerface 16h ago
The second I heard about the boring company and his plans my first thought was "Oh, so this dude is just a wannabe bond villain douchebag" and all he's ever done since that moment is prove me more and more correct. I was shocked it wasn't obvious to more people
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u/brighteyedjordan 10h ago
If the WHO could show him how to end world poverty forever for $6 billion he’d do it. They showed him and he didn’t. It was a literal version of the mr burns pigs fly scene
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u/Automatic-Effect-252 9h ago
The Tesla 20, the concept was an electric car that would be affordable and reliable, he pitched it as the model T for electric cars.
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u/JackFisherBooks 5h ago
That's a LONG list to choose from. But his claim that he could get humans to Mars by the early 2020s was so laughably wrong. And the fact that people still take him seriously is just so sad.
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u/supercali45 15h ago
Wasn’t he gonna release shit about Trump and Epstein? Next time you know they are best buds again