I can't comprehend for the life of me that people put their life savings in what Elon Musk is doing. Are people not seeing how he's lying about the future all the time?
He said he aimed to have 5000 Optimus robots out by end of 2025, 50000 by 2026 and 10 times that in 2027.
He promised in 2015 that full autonomous driving would arrive in 2 years and we aren't there yet 11 years later. He even said in 2016 that there would be coast-to-coast autonomous driving in 2017.
He promised manned missions to Mars by 2024-2025 in multiple interviews between 2011 and 2016.
He promised in 2016 that there would be solar roofs expansions by 2017 that didn't pan out, he promised AGI by 2025 in 2024.
Elon Musk has repeatedly lied about outcomes of his ventures, gotten crazy valuations based on those exaggerations and now people are starting to finally wake up that he isn't as good as his ego.
He claimed that he would unearth billions of dollars of government fraud, only to lie about that too. Instead his team cut aid programs and have contributed to an estimated 700,000 deaths so far.
"No Snowflake in an Avalanche Ever Feels Responsible"
You're right - we need to cut more. We'll save more lives if the US government stops the rate at which it is currently spending. The interest on our debt is currently larger that our military budget. The government can sell bonds to cover some of this debt but when it doesn't have money to cover mature bonds it needs to sell more bonds at a higher interest rates. It makes the deficit worse. The fed will respond with printing more money causing inflation. Inflation hurts the middle and lower classes the most. You either make massive cuts, or burden your productive wealth creating classes with taxes. We have a massive SPENDING problem.
Gotta hit on a few things there in no particular order:
- USAID's final budget was $34 billion. That's already very real money, but it came from the discretionary budget - that giant bill of spending where the government decides what to spend money on: schools, roads, housing, and so on. The entire discretionary budget for 2025 was $1.9 trillion, so USAID made up almost 2% of all the US' federal discretionary spending!
- Nothing USAID was doing was irreplaceable. The vacuum their exit has created is being rapidly filled by a wide mix of other interests. So saying they are saving a life when they are just another replaceable entity, even if a rather large one, is misleading. It's kind of like saying Google is why we have web browsers.
- USAID and the CIA worked hand-in-hand. For instance one project was USAID/CIA starting a fake social media site [1] in Cuba specifically with the goal of trying to create an insurrection, which would undoubtedly be very bloody had they succeeded. So in your calculus you need to account for deaths caused by USAID as well.
- Many of their programs seemed geared towards the creation of dependencies rather than working to ensure the self sustainability of various places. I think this likely ties into the above issue. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for life, give a man a fish a day and you now control that man because he's dependent upon you. Sociopathic intelligence agencies blending with philanthropy is a rather horrific combination.
> so USAID made up almost 2% of all the US' federal discretionary spending!
So, tiny; a fraction of what we spend on much less useful things like the Iran war or huge gifts to ICE.
30 years of that level of USAID funding would only get us to a single one of those trillions in debt.
> The vacuum their exit has created is being rapidly filled by a wide mix of other interests.
Yeah, we don't really want China vacuuming up all of Africa. It was already looking like a growing problem before the USAID cuts (https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IF11304).
> So in your calculus you need to account for deaths caused by USAID as well.
I mean, your one example cited didn't work and resulted in zero deaths. If we get to count that sort of thing, we'd have to start accounting for the soft power benefits of USAID (and those the CIA gets from the trade), too. Goodwill, intel, not having a bunch of polio infections come into the country via air, etc.
> Teach a man to fish and you feed him for life, give a man a fish a day and you now control that man because he's dependent upon you.
How does "deplete their fishing grounds (and other resources) for hundreds of years" figure into the analogy?
Yes the Iran war is also a waste of money. Money being wasted in one place is hardly an argument to do it in another place. And the whole point of discretionary spending is that it's money that could have been spent on society instead of e.g. setting up fake social media sites to try to cause chaos in another country. And because of regularly bloated spending I think we often lose track of what it really means. $34 billion is $100 from every man, woman, and child in the US. That's a lot of money, wasted every single year. And yeah after all is said and done Iran will cost hundreds more. Add Ukraine and we're up to the thousands. Add Iraq and we're getting into the tens of thousands soon enough. Imagine if all of this money was spent domestically.
The reason China is succeeding in Africa largely gets back to my critiques of USAID. China's pharma companies are establishing production factories within Africa for the local production of trade-level quantities of pharmaceuticals meaning they'll be able to provide not only for their own needs, but have enough production to turn drugs into exports. In the future Africa could even viably start to become a destination for medical tourism. The US could have done this and much more with the vast sums of money we blew on USAID, but we didn't. We preferred exploitable dependency creation paired alongside some corporate welfare for US big pharma. It's yet another example of the focus on short-term benefits while ignoring long-term costs. It's not like African nations don't realize what we're doing, while we then go and try to lecture them about the Chinese debt trap. What a shock that they're not listening.
> And the whole point of discretionary spending is that it's money that could have been spent on society instead of e.g. setting up fake social media sites to try to cause chaos in another country.
You think that's where most of USAID money is going?
> $34 billion is $100 from every man, woman, and child in the US.
Substantially less than unrest and unchecked disease in entire continents would cost us.
> Imagine if all of this money was spent domestically.
We'd probably blow it on some full-body MRIs.
> China's pharma companies are establishing production factories within Africa for the local production of trade-level quantities of pharmaceuticals meaning they'll be able to provide not only for their own needs, but have enough production to turn drugs into exports.
It's how China got big in the first place, even; we shipped our manufacturing there!
> It's not like African nations don't realize what we're doing, while we then go and try to lecture them about the Chinese debt trap. What a shock that they're not listening.
Certainly. But that's just trading one hegemon for another.
I think literally nobody knows where much, if not most, of USAID's money was going. It was a highly opaque organization that was regularly weaponized. Contrary to what most people think, Congress doesn't just automatically gain classified clearance. They are given information only a need-to-know basis and even then often only in briefing format. So you remember when USAID was being shut down and there was an all-hands-on-deck burning and shredding day getting rid of as much classified information as possible? [1] Great way to show they nothing to hide.
Your link reads like LLM slop and the very few specific details it offers ($ amount) is contradicted by the page it linked to. It also isn't related to Africa which is what we were talking about, and in any case you're obviously not going to kickstart manufacturing for $5 million ($2.5 million in the linked announcement). It also postdates China's actions by decades. The first Chinese factory in Africa opened up in 1998. [2]
China isn't a hegemon, does not seem to be pursuing hegemony, and I don't think that will change. They've had centuries of being the most powerful nation/empire in existence, but always remained within their own region, working more as a merchant than a conqueror. The US obsession with ruling the world is really kind of weird and nonsensical, because it's not only obviously an unobtainable goal in modern times, but it's not even in our own best interest.
> So you remember when USAID was being shut down and there was an all-hands-on-deck burning and shredding day getting rid of as much classified information as possible? Great way to show they nothing to hide.
Great way for Trump to prevent the agency from being able to rebuild effectively when courts order it open or Dems take over, you mean? This was an explicit tactic of the Trump administration; to make it hard to undo things.
> It also postdates China's actions by decades.
It's a single recent example of the tactic you assert the US wasn't doing. It's hardly the first such project USAID ever did.
> China isn't a hegemon, does not seem to be pursuing hegemony, and I don't think that will change.
Oh, yeah, they're just putting military bases in Africa and building islands for funsies.
When governments direct money to shadowy things it doesn't show up in the records as "money laundered to the CIA to try to foment insurrection" but as another normal sounding disbursal to one entity that hands it off to others (after taking a nice cut) and so on repeatedly. To actually know where the money is going you'd need to follow the path of the money from delivery to actual things being done as opposed to 'disbursed $xxx to shell corp, inc.'
That could be done relatively easily by requiring recipients strictly and recursively record every single dollar disbursed, and then publishing those. But it's not done, because the opacity is desired. The whole NGO scene is a complete racket before you add in the perverse motivations of USAID. The person who directed the mass destruction of classified documents at USAID was Erica Y Carr. [1] She joined USAID under Obama, and was appointed to head it under Biden.
Your last link did not demonstrate the creation of domestic manufacturing, let alone in Africa. If you could find meaningful examples of USAID doing such, you would have shared them. Thus it's safe to conclude that cannot find such, and so are now here trying to claim that nonsense is pertinent when you know it is not. That's not arguing in good faith, akin to you now trying to argue that China is the world hegemon because they have some military bases.
> If you could find meaningful examples of USAID doing such, you would have shared them. Thus it's safe to conclude that cannot find such, and so are now here trying to claim that nonsense is pertinent when you know it is not. That's not arguing in good faith…
A bit rich. Reminder... This was you:
"For instance one project was USAID/CIA starting a fake social media site in Cuba specifically with the goal of trying to create an insurrection, which would undoubtedly be very bloody had they succeeded."
Is it, thus, safe to assume you can't actually demonstrate USAID having done harm of this nature, and that it was raised in bad faith?
Your argument here doesn't make any sense. Do you disagree they were trying to foment an insurrection, or that it would have been bloody if successful? I assume not, because both are rather self evident. So it's not even clear what you're arguing - that USAID always fails? Again, you get weird things when you argue in bad faith.
But whatever, if you want clear examples then there's plenty to be had in the Office of Public Safety. [1] It's as Orwellian as it sounds and was directly under USAID. Modern examples are classified, though have been regularly referenced without detail by government officials speaking on record. Cuba's is the exception in classification, and clearly demonstrates their character as an organization.
If US backed NGOs were distributing life saving medications (e.g. for HIV-AIDS via PEPFAR, to give only one example) and then that distribution was withdrawn, causing recipients to die because they could no longer access medication, what other conclusion should we draw?
Maybe we should have elected Hillary Clinton then?
(This is a reference to Bill Clinton's extremely successful "Reinventing Government" initiative which actually balanced the federal budget until the next republican came along...)
> This is a reason why the US is trillions in debt.
Trump's OBBBA will be another reason, expected to add several trillion in the next few years. So yeah, real cuts are probably needed, but the DOGE people aren't achieving that in net.
To clarify, Elon himself opposed OBBBA because of the deficit. My point is that anyone cheering on DOGE for cuts but staying silent on the administration's generally bad record on spending, has an ideological bias that is not purely about fiscal responsibility.
Name 3 accomplishments he made and I'll show you world class work done elsewhere by other companies. The only thing he did which was notable was Starlink and I'll gladly grant you that. China is about to eat Starlink's lunch with their own tech.
Again I think people overestimate Musk's contributions to the world.
Tesla may not have pioneered fundamental technology, but it put together a combination of price and utility that nobody matched at the time. Find me anything in 2018 like a Model 3 that wasn't a compliance car.
Profitably reusable rockets were a major accomplishment. People like to argue against this. Every argument I've seen is either saying it doesn't actually save money or it wasn't new, neither of which is correct. It's very hard to argue with the numbers here; SpaceX is now launching more into orbit than every other launch provider combined.
I think the main reason people downplay these things is precisely because his own claims are so exaggerated. Doing 165 orbital launches in a year just doesn't sound impressive when he promised we'd be sending people to Mars years ago.
2. Made the modern EV relatively commonplace; no other manufacturer was taking it seriously until Tesla succeeded, and took many years to catch up, although they have
3. Re-usable rockets / higher launch cadence leading to significantly cheaper costs to put things in space. No major competition yet.
Falcon rockets, starlink, Tesla. They all pushed the envelope in their field. Are the stocks overpriced? Yes. Did they do impressive technical work? Also yes. They might get surpassed by competitors, but that is to be expected for all companies. But they clearly did something special there. And I deff am no Musk fanboy, but you have to give him the credit for establishing those systems.
"Every company you mentioned has made more progress in those spaces than anyone else"
Lies. Waymo beats Tesla in FSD. Optimus is nothing while China has full fucking martial arts robots. It's 2026 where's that 2025 manned Mars mission? Where's that 2025 AGI promise (currently running itself in circles.) His solar roof tile idea was a bunk plan and any regular roofer could've told you that.
China made a fucking electric car that can KITT jump. The only way Teslas get off the ground is when they hit curbs at batshit insane speeds.
Elon and his companies, outside of SpaceX, are generally frauds. Down to PayPal, which thinks it has a right to YOUR MONEY if you even so much as sneeze wrong (theft by contract.)
Yeah, but the topic of discussion is presumably FSD that actually works ;-)
And before people jump in to say "have you tried it, it works" yes I have a Tesla and FSD has tried to kill me multiple times already. Including jumping a damn red light after slowing down to a stop so I was absolutely unprepared to react.
Credit where it's due, it's a pretty nice car and even the self-driving technology is decent, despite being hobbled by Elon's nonsensical allergy to LIDAR or other sensors. But it is being marketed as "FSD" and it is very much not FSD, and I can't believe more is not being done to prevent the needless deaths that are inevitable because of this.
That simply isn't true. Progress toward a goal isn't the same as leading the field.
Autonomous driving is the clearest counterexample: by March 2026 Waymo had logged over 220 million rider-only miles with nobody in the driver's seat, and was doing 400,000+ rides per week across six US metros. Tesla's consumer product is still officially "Full Self-Driving (Supervised)," and Tesla itself says it does not make the car autonomous. Mercedes has Level 3 certification. Tesla has none.
Optimus missed the stated 5,000 robots in 2025. As of July 2026, Tesla still isn't selling it and is only preparing manufacturing capacity. Meanwhile Agility's Digit is in commercial warehouse deployment today. Solar Roof is worse: Musk targeted 1,000 installations per week, and Wood Mackenzie estimated Tesla averaged about 21 in 2022. Tesla's disputed the number but offered no replacement count.
SpaceX is the real exception. It genuinely leads, and the engineering is remarkable. But it's still a decade overdue on "crewed Mars by 2024." That's the point: on the one venture where "more progress than anyone else" is actually true, the promise is still failing by over a decade.
The criticism isn't that nothing comes to pass. It's that concrete near term promises repeatedly fail and get replaced by bigger ones. When a valuation depends on being uniquely far ahead, competitors catching up erases that premium fast.
Salesforce often does product announcements to determine how the market might respond before they ever build anything. The very thing they're selling may not exist and might not even be possible as they describe it.
I think it's a way some businesses just do business and the market has not issued a correction to that. Maybe it should?
His success is like the best case study in the world of how our current economic system is solely for the benefit of a privileged few.
He is obviously a liar, a conman and morally suspect. But he has mastered the art of lying in a way that people want to believe. So much so that he can separate fools from their money to the tune of billions.
When you can do that, every economic institution on the planet wants a piece. It's a firehouse of ill gotten cash, and those supporting his staggering rise to power are there to grab a bit of filthy lucre for themselves. It's a wealth transfer than comes along maybe only a few times in a generation.
Everyone knows he's a complete fraud even as they enable him to pull off all these stunts.
Yeah yeah yeah he lies all the time but Tesla cars exist and are awesome and the company is worth more than all other car companies combined going on how many years now? Do you really believe you have some unique insight that the rest of the market has not discounted? Spacex was probably just over valued and this sell off has nothing to do with “people starting to finally wake up that he isn’t as good as his ego”. I suspect the best thing you could for yourself, at least as far as the stock market goes, is humbly acknowledge you know nothing and just buy index funds.
He said he aimed to have 5000 Optimus robots out by end of 2025, 50000 by 2026 and 10 times that in 2027.
He promised in 2015 that full autonomous driving would arrive in 2 years and we aren't there yet 11 years later. He even said in 2016 that there would be coast-to-coast autonomous driving in 2017.
He promised manned missions to Mars by 2024-2025 in multiple interviews between 2011 and 2016.
He promised in 2016 that there would be solar roofs expansions by 2017 that didn't pan out, he promised AGI by 2025 in 2024.
Elon Musk has repeatedly lied about outcomes of his ventures, gotten crazy valuations based on those exaggerations and now people are starting to finally wake up that he isn't as good as his ego.