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The reason the bets are timed is that I wanted them to be resolvable within a reasonable timeline. I made the original bets 3 years ago, and 2 of the 3 users I made them with no longer seem to be posting here, so I think it's fair concern. I agree that it's possible for me to win them due to uninteresting factors, which is what I called a "technical" win in the top level post.
Closest I got was here. It's not a specific prediction about Starship, it's a general prediction based on the hype-cycle of his products / companies, and it boils down to:
This was about Tesla, but I get the feeling that Starship is SpaceX Roadster/Semi/Optimus, where Elon bit off more than he can chew. It's mostly based on instinct though, but in my defense, I've made a few long-shot predictions on my instinct, on this very forum, that turned out to be true.
Your specific arguments for why Starship can work all sound reasonable to me, but they don't sound different to me from arguments for why Cybertruck could be a good truck, why FSD could drive safer than human drivers, why optimus could be a great humanoid robot, etc. I'm not arguing for physical impossibility, I'm arguing against the "make insane marketing promises, and let the techies figure it out" management style.
Maybe. I know exactly the type of people you're talking about, and I admit I was influenced by them. On the other hand, my "I don't have MDS" argument is that I don't actually want to win these bets. I want to lose them, and lose spectacularly. A world where I get btfo'd is by far better than the one where I win, and the reason I'm betting the way I'm betting is because it sounds too good to be true.
Didn't he buy Cursor, and these guys were the ones who figured it out? It certainly shows a lot of political / business acumen, but I didn't get the impression that that's the sort of "it" he's supposed to have.
I don't challenge your reasoning for making resolvable bets, my problem is that they don't have much relation to the interesting question. This is the usual forecasting problem.
All of these efforts being meh (so far) is not very informative. Cybertruck is just a goofy car, there's only so much you can achieve by making a big electric pickup with edgy body panels. It adds very little to Tesla's current position. Car people are somewhat insane in paying so much attention to car models. FSD works, Waymo is reportedly great, so Tesla robotaxi also could work. Optimus is a legitimately good robot, it's just not the time for robots yet, and China is way ahead of Elon on the entire robot supply chain except high-end chips (both the brain and external compute). Starship is a categorical breakthrough in space logistics, which is the one area where Elon is far ahead of the competition already. There is no way for others to overtake him on any reasonable timeline.
He did, and no doubt their data has contributed a lot. But the base model is in-house, and I see that RL was done on xAI's stack. This is impressive because the original xAI team has completely fallen apart, there was the impression that xAI has become a mere compute provider for Anthropic. He has crashed and rebuilt a near-frontier lab from the ruins. This suggests at the very least good capability for delegation outside the hardware domain.
In absurdly compressed timeline. Something like 3 months. Even with homegrown meth labs I can't see how they can deliver in such a short time.
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I just wanted a way to get out of the "would the Enterprise win against a Star Destroyer" type nerd slapfights. I agree it was far from optimal, but it was the only thing I could come up with, and no one actually stopped to raise that particular objection at the time. The bet-takers thought Elon is great, so he will surely crack this trivial problem in no-time, which was part of the problem I was meaning to highlight.
Well, hold on. Waymo has a very different approach to Tesla. It's armed to the teeth with sensors - cameras, radar, lidar, audio... the works. I think they even do a high-definition scan of the cities they deploy in. Elon claimed he could crack it with cameras and AI alone. Using one as an example for why the other could work seems wrong. What's more, he was constantly promising that all the hardware for a better-than-human FSD is already inside each and every Tesla, and it's just a question of working out the kinks in the software. That soon (next year, next year, next year... no matter which year we were currently in), at the press of a button, every Tesla would become fully autonomous. Recently they said some of the older hardware might not be enough, and that they will need to upgrade it, and more recently still they gave up on even that idea. People paid a pretty steep price for a feature that never arrived.
Did they make some great leap recently that I'm not aware of? I think every other robotics company I've seen came up with something more impressive. It even looks like they're remotely controlled during their demos.
Well, but if it's not time for robots, why is he acting like this is the very thing that will take the entire company to an entirely new level? Transform human society, even. Shouldn't his car company focus on cars, and leave humanoid robots as a niche R&D project?
Maybe. Like I said your arguments for why it can work sound reasonable to me, but the problem is they sound similar to why FSD can work. I also saw what I think is a very similar next year / next year / next year dynamic with it. He used to do these semi-regular all-hands meeting at Starbase, where he'd talk about Starship (I think I linked to them in the old post I referred to in the previous comment), and from what I recall they started off with saying Starship V1 will be able to take 100t to orbit, a few years later that V1 could take (100 -X)t to orbit but V2 will be able to take 100t, and a few more years after that, that V1 could take (100 - X - Y)t to orbit, V2 (100 - X)t, but V3 will be able to take 100t.
Maybe they'll finally crack it, but it looks like "fake it 'till you make it" to me. I used to work for a guy like that, that would make insane promises to clients, and than expected me to deliver. If I have MDS, it might just be PTSD that Elon is triggering by reminding me of the experience.
About SpaceX being ahead of the competition: yes, but this used to also be the case for Tesla, and now BYD overtook it. There are other companies who are still in the nipping at the heels phase, but it's not obvious to me why it would stay this way given how difficult Staship development is proving to be, and how far they already got with their own rockets of similar class.
Optimus is great. Very good hands (some Chinese stole them), powerful, iterates quickly, and more importantly I can trust Elon to mass produce it, as he mass produces lots of things. Sure it's a bit quaint compared to the Chinese robotic supply chain and scaling potential of Unitree and UBTech and others. But regulatory barriers will all but ensure that Western markets heavily go to Elon.
The problem with Optimus and with Tesla taxis is the same: it's a bet on the exponential, and you don't know your exact location. Elon's theory of victory for FSD is that good enough AI will make do with human-level sensorium; arguments about lidars being expensive are of course nonsense, the costs of lidars can fall like costs of any other component. He's obviously correct on the substance; the question is what does it take for "good enough", how much more data, pretraining and onboard processing? He keeps discovering that the answer is "more than you have". But at some point, very likely it just works and Waymos become overengineered toys.
I can't muster the outrage. His corporate governance experiments have trivial explanations, and he'll have the cash to burn on it all.
I think you miss other variables changing.
The problem is they haven't gotten far. If rocket reliability requires exploiting Wright's law, Elon is very much ahead.
Well, at least as far as Starship is concerned, neither has SpaceX.
If. All the Falcons they produced didn't seem to help them get to a running start with Starship.
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I disagree, that is the primary "it" that he has, and the most important one by far. It doesn't really matter how elegant your product is, how technologically advanced, how innovative. The ability to create a solid business plan and actually execute it (eventually) is the critical factor. SpaceX is the best example: none of the technologies involved are especially novel: keralox rocket engines, aluminum alloy rocket bodies, carbon fiber fairings, etc. The actual innovation of SpaceX was figuring out a way to build and operate these things in a way that made them profitable at scale. This is an unpopular view, I know, due to the implications about whig history, but is something I think is true of all the great industrialists.
Elon himself is very well aware of this. I sometimes say that he's spiritually Chinese, which is lost on his greatest admirers in the West, who imagine his success is due to some brilliant insights. No, it's similar to what guys like Lei Jun do, just with American capital scale and more chutzpah. It's maybe the most potent recipe there exists.
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