>Robotaxi, your Optimus, your lunar lander, your space datacenter etc. And the list keeps getting longer instead of shorter...
Lets go through this one by one
[1]Robotaxi.
Someone just drove coast to coast USA fully on autopilot. I drive my tesla every day, and i literally NEVER disengage autopilot. It gets me to work and back home without fail, to the grocery store, to literally anywhere i need. Whats not full self driving about that? I got in two crashes before i got my Tesla cause i was a dumb teen, but i'm sure my Tesla is a much better driver than my younger sister. Politically it's not FSD, but in reality, it has been for a while.
[2]
Optimus has gone through three revisions and has hand technology that is 5+ years ahead of the competition. Even if they launched it as a consumer product now, i'm sure a million people would buy it just as a cool toy/ gadget. AKA a successfull product.
[3] Lunar Lander
Starship, a fully reusable, 2 stage rocket that has gone through 25 revisions and is 95% flight proven and has even deployed dummy starlinks. 10+ years ahead of everyone except maybe stoke.
[4]Space Datacenter
Have you ever used starlink? They have all the pieces they need... Elon build a giant datacenter in 6 monmths when it takes 3-4 years usually. He has more compute than anybody and Grok is the most intelligent AI by all the metrics outside googles. Combine that with Starship, which can launch 10X the capacity for 10% of the cost, and what reason do you have to doubt him here?
Granted... it always takes him longer than he says, but he always eventually comes through.
Eventually comes through? Have you forgotten Hyperloop, new roadster, instant battery swaps, tunnels to replace all traffic, your car appreciating in value, your car being used as a robotaxi during downtime to make you money, semi convoys, etc etc?
They don't come through on every thing but they come through on innovative more than any other groups of companies I can think of. Tesla, SpaceX, Starlink... you really don't think they've delivered incredible products on these things already?
Also, hyperloop wasn't something he really stuck with.
hyperloop got open sourced. He spawned and gave engineering support for a wide variety of companies, i think richard branson started one too/ provided a bunch of funding. He saw the biggest problem as the tunnel boring, so he focused on that and thought the other companies would figure it out. One of the OG's from SpaceX now runs boring company and they are on v5-6 of the tunnel boring machine?
He makes big prenouncements, but once he gets in the engineering details... they cease to make sense. Tesla in tunnels makes more sense because they can be end to end. Instead of a hypoerloop, you can drive a cybertruck fast AF down a tunnel. (Again, tunnel boring is the bottleneck here.)
New roadster is on like revision 20+. They had 4 roadsters in 2018, each different from the last. Last i've heard on this, the roadster is going "to fly".I think what he means by this is they are going to add krypton, or some sort of thruster to the car. They don't want to launch the roadster to compete with the cyber truck.
Instant battery swaps were for rigidity purposes. If you cast the battery directly into the car, the battery becomes part of the frame, resulting in a much smoother ride. They did have a couple prototypes of Battery swaps, but they decided not to pursue it and instead focus on improving the megachargers.
Tunnels to replace all traffic was discussed above a bit, but he did do the vegas loop and is doing it for waaaaayyyyyyy less than any other underground system. Something like $42m for the whole vegas loop. I think the boring company has like 5-6 ongoing projects around the US. Did you expect him to do it over night? They custom built a boring machine, like 6 times over and are doing projects all over the US.
your car appreciating in value... I mean, they actually kinda did... If you had an early enough reservation on the model 3, you could make a big flip. Thats why they put a clause in for the cybertruck where you couldn't flip. Also, renting it out on E-turo was very profitable for the longest time. All jokes aside, cause i know that's not what you're talking about... Yeah, that's a bold face lie from elons part. Because latest models only are going to run on AI6 chip.
Semi Convoys are an awesome idea and could totally work. I mean... like i said, AI self driving is pretty good. Especially on freeways. Streets, not 100% solved, but i literally never have to disengage on the freeway. They just built an entire dedicated manufacturing facility that started commisioning this month for the Semi. You will see this alot more often. Obviously they'll still have human drivers, but i'm sure they can write some software to make this possible and provide some "draft effect" for the semis.
> Along for the trip this time were Warren Ahner, an AI exec and former autonomy executive for a major automaker, and self-driving enthusiast Paul Pham. Both are deeply knowledgeable about Tesla’s Full-Self Driving suite and Roy stressed that he couldn’t have completed the trip without them.
Interesting - wonder when it will be ready for use by non-experts
Im from LA... the type of people who play music or talk on speaker are not the kinda people you'd want to do this too.. This sounds like a perfect way to get stabbed.
Fun light hearted github, that will passively agressively get someone killed.
> With a maximum take-off weight of about 16 tons, a 25-meter wingspan and an operational ceiling of 15,000 meters, Jiutian can remain airborne for roughly 12 hours and reach targets up to 7,000 kilometers away
Okay, you're right... their military capabilities are still laughable. Thanks for the reassurance, that'll help me sleep at night a bit better.
Well, you have different players now... working at a different scale.
They are purchasing crypto infrastructure for a huge premium, importing massive turbines from old generation facilities, making huge personal investments in nvidia stock for "preference", and acquiring companies that happen to have an order.
It went from we need to make a data center as cost efficient as possible to we need a data center at all costs.
> this will never work because governments will never allow for disintermediation of their currency because it’s one of, if not THE, primary sources of control over a population
So, has trump coin and world liberty financial proven your friend wrong? What about El salvador or the cayman islands?
It seems that it was you who misunderstood human nature. Greed always wins.
Keep in mind the definition of 'work': Bitcoin was originally intended to be a day-to-day medium of exchange, not a 'long term store of value'. It's much more of a threat to governments as the former but that really hasn't actually panned out (including in the places you mention), and it's just a random speculative asset which financial systems will toy with like any other.
> So, has trump coin and world liberty financial proven your friend wrong?
No:
1. That's not being implemented as a permanent replacement for typical currency, that's cryptocurrency as a specialized temporary vehicle for accepting bribes and fleecing the gullible.
2. Even if #1 were not true, it's rather hard for a democratic government to react when key positions in that government have (temporarily, I trust) been taken over by a cult that profits from the scheme.
> It seems that it was you who misunderstood human nature. Greed always wins.
That's an inaccurately nihilistic view of what "human nature" encompasses. If greed always won, nobody would have pets, charities would not exist, parents would enslave their children, life-insurance would just be an invitation to filicide, etc.
okay, well i've been hearing this "Gov would never let crypto live"... but i keep waiting? All i see are more and more govs and entities like blackrock being co-opted.
What would actually convince you this line of reasoning is wrong?
> i've been hearing this "Gov would never let crypto live"... but i keep waiting?
I think the first step is to narrow what role/purpose of "crypto" we're trying to consider, that a government would or wouldn't permit to "live".
For example, imagine there's a 100% government-run system with only "official" transaction signing nodes and everyone's public key is on-file along with their real identity. That would be "cryptocurrency" in a technological sense, but clearly not the political change some people are interested in.
Next there's the economic distinctions like the unit of account [0] versus medium of exchange [1] versus store of value [2], which are all different roles. For example, gift-cards might be a medium of exchange in some sketchy places, but the unit of account is the dollar-amount on them. Which roles would cryptocurrency be actually taking?
> All i see are more and more govs and entities like blackrock being co-opted.
The way I see it, the optimistic utopian dreams of cryptocurrency are going nowhere. Meanwhile, big banks banks--or by upstarts trying to replace them in the same basic game--are trying to use "crypto" to grow while dodging normal laws and regulations.
TrumpCoin and WLF are obvious grifts by parties associated with Trump and not actually part of government policy, and the president is not a rational actor trying to maintain a capable government.
El Salvador's experiment was generally a failure for various reasons, and they agreed to start rolling back the policies as part of an agreement with the IMF for another loan.
These projects happened because, yes, greed wins and destroys everything in its wake.
What about blackrock etf's? Tether being a huge buyer and holder of US treasuries for like 8 years straight? How the US and other countries are paving the way for stablecoin legislation. Tether is one of the most profitable companies of all time working with major banks on decreasing settlement times by days into seconds....
El Salvador did not roll back their policies... they have been a continual buyer, they just rolled back their "Required by law to be accepted", they added a bunch of special cases where you don't have to accept it, but alot of tourist destinations like el zonte still accept it (or atleast they did when i was there in late 2024).
That's not true. The money you use to buy stocks gets you an ownership interest in a company that creates value. The money you put into crypto gets you a line on a distributed spreadsheet.
The money that comes out of your ownership share is tied to the success of the company, through dividends and buybacks.
Well, because crypto has been a crime for it's entire lifetime. Any of my friends who got funding to work on crypto got debanked, fined, jail time etc. Throughout the entire Obama-Biden era. Only under the latest Trump admin are there new VC funding and things like ETF's, stablecoin settlements, and crossborder regulation being "Accepted" even though we have no legal framework.
So... Crypto is illegal so anyone using is defacto a criminal by definition.
Also, for this particular instance this is the best bug bounty program i've ever seen. Running a monero node that hits your daily budget cap is not that bad... It could be way worse like steal you DB creditials and sell it to the highest party... So, crypto actually made this better.
At federal minimum wage, you make 15k a year. NASDAQ 100 is on average 14.6% per year. It only takes 100k to passively earn more than the vast majority of labor.
We have arrived to the point where capital is vastly more important and productive than labor. AI has only make that worse. Historically, there has been a balance because it was Capital and labor that were required to generate outsized returns. But once you strip out incremental cost with software, and tack on an AI "service" layer, where are the need for employees?
The one saving grace, is that this will also break the VC model. When one youtuber who has 100k subs can spin out 20 different apps a year, we fragment the app space, allowing alot of micro businesses to form around "brands". But "brands" will just be social media influencers.
Employment stats are designed to measure economy-wide shifts, not early, localized, white-collar disruptions. The sampling will smooth those effects away until they’re large.
CPS samples 60k households per month to represent ~150+ million workers. Households stay in the sample 4 months, out 8, back 4.
Copywriters will get smoothed out in the aggregate, and the definition will mask this. Even if you work one hour, you are technically employed. If you are not actively looking for work for more than a month, you are also not technically unemployed.
Unemployment data is a lagging indicator for detecting recessions not early technological displacement in white-collar niches.
from my perspective, this is exactly where we are. Have you ever watched starter story? There's hundreds of people with 5,6+ apps making 100k+ MRR. The VC model is broken because of it.
Lets go through this one by one
[1]Robotaxi. Someone just drove coast to coast USA fully on autopilot. I drive my tesla every day, and i literally NEVER disengage autopilot. It gets me to work and back home without fail, to the grocery store, to literally anywhere i need. Whats not full self driving about that? I got in two crashes before i got my Tesla cause i was a dumb teen, but i'm sure my Tesla is a much better driver than my younger sister. Politically it's not FSD, but in reality, it has been for a while.
[2] Optimus has gone through three revisions and has hand technology that is 5+ years ahead of the competition. Even if they launched it as a consumer product now, i'm sure a million people would buy it just as a cool toy/ gadget. AKA a successfull product.
[3] Lunar Lander Starship, a fully reusable, 2 stage rocket that has gone through 25 revisions and is 95% flight proven and has even deployed dummy starlinks. 10+ years ahead of everyone except maybe stoke.
[4]Space Datacenter Have you ever used starlink? They have all the pieces they need... Elon build a giant datacenter in 6 monmths when it takes 3-4 years usually. He has more compute than anybody and Grok is the most intelligent AI by all the metrics outside googles. Combine that with Starship, which can launch 10X the capacity for 10% of the cost, and what reason do you have to doubt him here?
Granted... it always takes him longer than he says, but he always eventually comes through.