Tesla Announces a Humanoid Robot “Tesla Bot”

Exactly. People were saying it was impossible. He announced it to happen in 2018. It will happen 3-4 years later than planned. And people use that to bash him, forgetting the elephant in the room which is that he made the supposedly impossible possible.

1. Nowhere indicates Elon Musk believes "he can easily repeat that success in other areas."

2. So do you believe you know better (than Musk) about - the relative difficulties of disruption of auto and space industries vs this humanoid industry and - Self-driving to be judgemental?

I would hold my tongue and meanwhile, wait and see.

> First, no one denies that reusability is still not profitable. This includes Musk himself and heads of all the other rocket companies who have all made it clear they aren't pursing it because these is simply no business case for it.

It makes no sense for them because they can't offer a low enough price and otherwise create payloads in order to achieve a flight rate.

ULA simply only has one costumer, the US military and very occasionally NASA. They have never really competition in the private market or ever tried to generate their own payloads to increase flight rate.

Arianespace is a incredibly bureaucratic organization where everything has to go threw a political process. It cost them 4 billion to create a pretty average quality large rocket and doing re-usability for them would take 1-2 decades and another 10 billion.

The idea that it is not profitable or more generally wroth it for SpaceX is crazy. SpaceX has mentioned many times that even only using the rockets 2 times already makes sense for them. They are getting 10 reuses out of the Block 5 rockets. The idea that it was not worth the investment is frankly speaking laughable.

Without re-usability things like Starlink would simply not be possible in the first place.

> He currently sells 1 regular launch for 50 million each, so your numbers just don't add up. This isn't a money making scheme.

While I agree that Mars travel is not a money making scheme, those 50 million includes a huge margin and another huge cost for the second stage.

If you assume almost no margin and you assume a equally reusable upper stage, far less operational cost, no fairing recovery cost, less refurbishment cost and so on you can get the number way lower then the current Falcon 9 price. Depending on flight rate cost in the low millions are approachable for LEO launches.

There are other opportunities, dedicate tanker Starship should reduce the number refueling required. Next generation Raptor 2 versions and new ally for the Starship should eventually make it possible deliver a 250 tons reusable. Meaning you can potentially do 4 refueling flights, not 8.

The pure business case for Mars colony still doesn't add up but low enough to make a Mars bases together with NASA totally feasible.

No it isn't. That literally the dumbest thing I have read in this thread. So your friend is the CEO two of the most successful tech companies of the decade.

Specially a person with the history of having the exact follow-through you criticize him for. Have you literally not been around for the last 2 decades?

Funny that this person that you have diagnosed drug addiction is widely more successful then you are.

I really don't get the problem here. They want to work on a very difficult problem, they have admitted it is difficult.

Are people angry that Musk said he will have a prototype in a 18 month? Are they angry because he dared even mention wanting to work on that problem.

> landing the rocket is really cool, but normal people overestimate the difficulty.

Building the biggest rocket in the world, building new engines that are better then any invented in human history, coming up with a complete new way of reentering and doing a never before done landing maneuver and doing that from a space port that was basically a swamp only 1.5 years earlier is quite different then 'landing a rocket'.

Of course it doesn't mean he can magically do anything but his companies have enough engineering credit between them that when they announce to put serious resources behind something we should at least not dismiss them out of hand.

The have fully vertically integrated AI, power electronics, manufacturing robots and batteries both design, testing&validation and manufacturing facilities. Not to mention lots of capital and a CEO who clearly is supportive of the project if its gone make short term money or not.

I for one am interested to see where this is in 2-3 years.

> The list of things Elon has said they will achieve, and have not, far exceeds the list of exceptional tech his companies have produced.

Questionable. If you give an product announcement a 3-4 year lead time for development and commercialization. When you go back over the existence Musk companies, I would suggest that most has actually happened.

Sure they didn't do Red Dragon, propulsive Dragon landing, Roadster and Semi is not out yet FSD clearly didn't go as he hopped. I guess we could come up with some other abandoned and delayed projects. I guess they just delayed Cybertruck for a few more month but that is hardly noteworthy in the automotive industry.

The Starship projects is still remarkably close to the timeline from 2016 (that was considered beyond delusional by industry experts), Raptor and Vacuum Raptor outperform what was announced, Starlink are regularly launching and they are mass producing phase array antennas. Falcon 9 platform reached the 10 relights that was the initial target. The have managed to deliver humans to Station and bring them back (years before the competitor who will get 2 extra billion will be able to).

Tesla despite people clowning Musk about how dumb he is about manufacturing has scaled manufacturing as fast as almost no other manufacturing company ever has and there is no end in sight (new factories coming online as soon as this end of this year). Not to mention that they have achieved industry leading unit margins on that production. They are by far the largest produces of BEVs in the world by volume and by a even larger amount by revenue. They are producing Plaid power train cars and have made the fastest production car in history.

They are in the final stretch of having completed a re-design and re-engineering of a battery manufacturing line and battery. They did this almost fully vertically integrated building much of their own manufacturing equipment. This project alone is a gigantic engineering effort of a scale that is hard to really grasp. The end of this year is very likely when the first actual cars with these batteries will be sold.

I think FSD is by far their most visible and most relevant failure and by far the most talked about on HN, but overall I think its hard to point to any companies that did better in terms of technology development last decade (specially considering that when the decade started these companies were tiny).