He's at his lowest point in the eyes of the media (which is how most of us see the world) but hes actually at the highest point in his career and achievements.
Tesla is about to explode in production with their "biggest building in the world factory" in texas, berlin and china.
SpaceX is about to achieve the holy grail of the space industry (an affordable and reusable rocket) not to mention Starlink.
Tesla has always been "about to explode" in one way or another. When will people realize that manufacturing businesses, when they are limited by property and equipment, are slow-burning?
Also, "reusable" doesn't matter as much as "affordable" for rockets. I am waiting for one of the smaller companies with a dirt cheap rocket to eat SpaceX's lunch.
That's actually not true. For example, the Russian Soyuz is expected to still have lower cost per kg to LEO than the Falcon rockets from SpaceX. Fuel is the vast majority of the cost of a rocket launch.
That's completely wrong. Fuel is a tiny fraction of a rocket launch. At best, SpaceX's Falcon 9 costs $15 million to refurbish and re-launch (according to Musk). About $200,000 of that is fuel. That works out to 1.3% of costs which is far from "the vast majority."
$200,000 is the cost of the atoms in the fuel. Most of the rest of the $15 million is the cost to get those atoms to the right temperature and pressure when they are stored at a different temperature and pressure, transport those atoms, and put them in the shell. Not to mention the cost of cleaning and coating the fuel tanks to make sure that they are inert and won't react to the fuel (this has to be done on non-reusable rockets too).
This is the typical sleight-of-hand that comes at Musk companies. The atoms in the fuel are cheap, but the process of turning those atoms into usable fuel is very expensive. This is the case for almost all rockets.
The Soyuz is partly cheap to launch because it doesn't need a lot of special fuel handling.
err, are you forgetting the cost to literally build a rocket? Or are you arguing somehow that fuel costs more than building the first stage of a rocket?
The idea somehow that Soyuz is cheaper than Falcon-9 is laughable.
You can buy the atoms from Sigma Aldrich or any other chemical supplier. You have to buy a lot of atoms, and you have to buy them by the liter.
If you want rocket fuel from those chemicals, you are going to have to pressurize them and cool them or warm them, and you need a lot of energy and equipment to do it. That is the expensive part. Often, rocket fuels are heavily pressurized orsupercooled, and supercooling a gas is expensive. That allows you to store more energy in a given volume.
Rather than digging in after your initial mistake, it'd be better to google it. This is a no-stakes random internet argument, so you've gotten the lesson cheap; but if you repeat the same mistake elsewhere you could do yourself a lot of harm.
And this is what i fail to understand. He has kept his nose clean, apart from some minor incidents ("pedo" tweet comes to mind). How does he have the time and why does he bother to spend his time making noise on Twitter. He should focus on the final push to get both of his major companies to the next level. It's almost as if he's gotten bored and wants to move on, but has to keep up the appearance of being involved in day-to-day managment of these companies
Tesla cars are garbage, speaking as a Tesla owner. They demo nicely, but they are put together poorly. The minute there's any meaningful competition they'll crumble.
Combined with the risks from their autopilot system and their mistreatment of workers and their CEO being a right wing edgelord? There's plenty of reasons to think Tesla might not be on a good path.
They've also been topping the lists of unreliability.
Many people like the things Tesla does well enough to not be bothered by the things it does poorly so are satisfied.
Tesla seems to have the best EV drivetrain in the business (I'm counting the battery as part of the drivetrain) and the best charging network, but seem to be worse in most other aspects.
My guess is that the other car companies will catch up on EV drivetrains faster than Tesla can catch up on the rest of a car.
They did top the lists, but they've dropped off as owners deal with the reality of owning them.
An electric car, competently built, will wow most folks. Remember that the satisfaction numbers are comparing apples to oranges, given the limited competition Tesla has at the moment.
This depends a lot on the factory / year of production. E.g. the 2021/2022 from Giga Shanghai have great quality. Of course, consistency is the key, Tesla has to achieve it across all of the factories.
And I have no idea what 'risks' are you talking about regarding autopilot.
Tesla is about to explode in production with their "biggest building in the world factory" in texas, berlin and china.
SpaceX is about to achieve the holy grail of the space industry (an affordable and reusable rocket) not to mention Starlink.