Re: Monty: Elon has space lasers ?

On 2025-05-22 14:26:45 +0000, Scott Lurndal said:

kludge@panix.com (Scott Dorsey) writes:

Cryptoengineer  <petertrei@gmail.com> wrote:

 I suspect you held a different opinion of him in 2017.

 A lot of us did, because in 2017 he was a loonie, but he was a loonie
doing good work.  Much like Steve Jobs, he was a guy with a vision and
with money and he might have been crazy and abusive but could be
forgiven for that because of that vision.
 Now he's gone from building things to destroying things, and so of
course many of us have changed our opinion of him.
 

He didn't found Tesla, but did build it into the first successful new
American car company in 50 years, and made the EV a serious option for
drivers. The Model Y was the highest selling vehicle of any kind in
2024.

 This is true, and he does get a lot of credit for that, in part because
Tesla was built from the ground up and even if he didn't start from the
ground up himself, it wasn't built on any existing design or manufacturing
facility.

 Actually, he was fortunate that the NUMMI plant had just been
idled.
 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NUMMI
 Without that, he likely would have had difficulties getting sufficient
funding to build a greenfield plant.

Plus their first car, the Tesla Roadster, was really just a Lotus Elise that had been convereted to electric power using the original company' creators ideas from their kit car they had before Muskrat got involved.
Would the Tesla company and other car models still exist without Elongated Muskrat's money and idiotic ideas ... probably not, but the world would also now be a much better place and the roads a lot safer.