• reddig33@lemmy.world
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    24 days ago

    I wouldn’t doubt that Elon designed the Cybertruck. I mean just look at how ugly and impractical it is. He probably drew it on a napkin or MS Paint or something.

    • tempest@lemmy.ca
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      24 days ago

      Honestly it might have been fine if he managed to keep his public image under control or it was not so tightly coupled with Tesla’s brand. Most large trucks and SUVs are suburban grocery getters or used to take Timmy to soccer practice so they don’t actually have to be practical at all.

      I honestly like the blade runner look. At least it’s a little different than the ubiquitous cross overs that all look the same. I would never buy one though because Tesla has shit quality and Elon is a wanker.

      • takeda@lemmy.world
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        24 days ago

        I was his fan at the time and at the reveal and it still looked like a joke to me. He also didn’t deliver on range and price.

        The only people that got interested in it are those that wants to get attention, because the shape provides it. It doesn’t look like the car provides anything else.

          • DaddleDew@lemmy.world
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            24 days ago

            He kept boasting that it was “bullet proof”. Meanwhile I could easily imagine the engineers in the back really badly hoping he would shut up about that because they understood the gravity of the costs and compromises that would have been required to actually make this car bulletproof

            Guess what, turns out it’s not bullet proof after all. What a shocker.

        • HakFoo@lemmy.sdf.org
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          24 days ago

          They should have made like 10 and raffled them off for charity.

          Then he gets the goodwill of “They actually delivered a car that looks exactly like the prototype” without the expectations on quality and performance of a made-by-the-thousands serial production product.

          The firm who makes a few carbon-fibre Batmobiles for film sets and rich geeks doesn’t get the same guff that GM would if they started selling them in Buick dealerships.

      • anomnom@sh.itjust.works
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        23 days ago

        I won’t ever win a wank mobile, but some of the components and castings are really high quality. Some are really fucking poor design decisions too though.

    • DaddleDew@lemmy.world
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      24 days ago

      That’s the thing. Design implies engineering decisions. Decisions requiring huge amounts of expertise, talent and work. All Musk did is get in front of his lead engineers, handed a crudely drawn triangle on a piece of paper and said “It must look like this, make it happen”. He did the easiest 0.001% part of the job of coming up with an idea for something that he thought looked cool and the rest was done by people who are far more intelligent and talented than him. And yet he is the one giving himself all the credit for it. This undeserved self-praise, stealing of credit (and wages) from other people’s work and the sheer arrogant intellectual dishonesty of believing that he is as smart and hard working as those people who are actually making things happen is why I can’t stand Musk.

      The fact that the Cybertruck is a stupidly flawed, barely functional monstrosity with tons of production issues and insane price tag are side effects of all the compromises that had to be done to fulfill Musk’s demands. It is literally Musk’s equivalent of The Homer car from the Simpsons.

    • Blackmist@feddit.uk
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      24 days ago

      It’s definitely his Homer Simpson car. I bet he drew it in crayon with his tongue out.

      • Karyoplasma@discuss.tchncs.de
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        24 days ago

        Huh, I thought its inspiration is the lego car I’ve built when I was 3. They didn’t quite manage to capture the more intricate details of my magnum opus tho.

      • AnyOldName3@lemmy.world
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        24 days ago

        I consider this an insult to one of my favourite Sci-fi vehicles. The one from Aliens looks much better, much more practical, and much more like something humans should try to build.

        • chilicheeselies@lemmy.world
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          24 days ago

          Its really impracticle. Its riding so low to the ground. What kind of combat terrain could it possibly be useful in othet than a perfect undisturbed urban street?

          • AnyOldName3@lemmy.world
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            23 days ago

            Canonically, this is the lightweight model meant for flatter ground, roads, and the insides of spaceship corridors, and it was deployed to a colony with paved roads and indoor corridors, so it had its adjustable suspension set to minimum ground clearance for better handling. Obviously, this was retrospective to explain away the exact point you’re raising after they’d already made the prop and possibly released the film, but being a sci-fi vehicle, adjustable suspension, something that’s available in cars you can buy today, would be something safe to assume it must have just from watching the film and noticing the lack of ground clearance.

  • DaddleDew@lemmy.world
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    24 days ago

    Musk is only good at one thing, which is play investors like violins to generate hype and secure more investments for the company. The rest of the company’s success is owed to the extremely competent and talented engineers and workers making those extremely ambitious projects a reality.

    Every time Musk tries to pretend he’s an engineer and tries to micromanage engineering and design decisions we end up with things like the Cybertruck.

    I’m going to keep repeating it until it becomes common knowledge: When Musk stole the company from its original founders in a board coup, he specifically demanded that the cars have flush-fitting door handles despite his engineer’s objections. Reinventing the door handles was excessively time and cost prohibitive because of the crash safety requirements involved but Musk would hear none of it. And it was. It nearly bankrupted the company early on and it was only saved by government grants from the Obama days.

    • agamemnonymous@sh.itjust.works
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      24 days ago

      Every time Musk tries to pretend he’s an engineer and tries to micromanage engineering and design decisions we end up with things like the Cybertruck.

      I read a comment somewhere by someone who worked at SpaceX, and they said a crucial part of the job was tactfully distracting him while he was in the facility. Otherwise, he would make nonsensical design suggestions and expect them to be implemented.

      • BastingChemina@slrpnk.net
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        23 days ago

        This is there title from a Blomberg article:

        SpaceX’s Secret Weapon Is Gwynne Shotwell

        She launches spaceships, sells rockets, and deals with Elon Musk.

        I think it’s that, she is one is there most influential person that made SpaceX successful.

        Cybertruck is what happen when people don’t say no to Musk.

  • Burninator05@lemmy.world
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    24 days ago

    He is a good marketer and salesman. If he hadn’t been born rich he would some schlub somewhere selling timeshares to old people.

    • cazssiew@lemmy.world
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      23 days ago

      I think this is the best take, just like Trump he’s willing to say any old bullshit to get his way. I’m unwilling to call it charisma, I’d rather go with mythomania.

    • StopTouchingYourPhone@lemmy.world
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      23 days ago

      Apologies for being completely off topic. But I have a theory that if he’d been born a pleb he’d have “taught” English in some country where a white person doesn’t require any kind of teaching qualifications beyond the ability to speak their first language. He’d be regaling everyone who’ll listen with his judgy observations about the local culture and teaching wrong grammar rules “because that’s just the way we say it.” That’s who I’m pretty sure this twit would be. Would definitely have a blog called something like Korean Musk.

  • Phoenixz@lemmy.ca
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    24 days ago

    It’s missing that Musk was fired for incompetence

    It’s missing that Musk paid twice the value of twitter, then tossed it off a cliff making it worth only 20% from the original value. Basically he just pulled a joker and burned a huge pile of money for shits and giggles

    • JasonDJ
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      24 days ago

      Musk has gotten his money’s worth, and thensome, from Twitter.

      Just because it went down in monetary value doesn’t mean he hasn’t benefited in other ways. He most definitely has.

        • InputZero@lemmy.world
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          23 days ago

          True but through buying Twitter he also obtained the ability to suppress other people. Xitter hasn’t been replaced as the global town square. It’s starting to become obvious that a lot of the accounts of people who directly criticize Musk, or say things he and his buddies don’t like will be suspended. There’s no way he could keep his money and stifle other people’s free speech, because that’s what he bought. He didn’t buy Twitter, he bought complete control over the ability to suppress speech in the global town square.

      • JasonDJ
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        23 days ago

        Oh absolutely. Trump found his Goebbels. And aside from that, he’s talking about axing departments that effect him and his business. He’s already talking about CFPB and he had been talking about making X into an everything app (including handling payments), which CFPB would absolutely oversee.

        I’m sure he’d be looking at NHTSA for Tesla and EPA for all the lithium he’s gotta deal with, too.

        Who will benefit from this? Certainly not the X users who will get defrauded or hit with excessive fees. Certainly not the people who get hit by injured or killed by self-deiving Teslas that were prematurely approved, or people drinking polluted water from runoff from lithium mines.

        And there will likely continue to be no oversight over social media or any of the internet. Fake news will continue to spread virally with even more velocity than it does now. Probably exclusively on X, since Musk has known to have a long standing feud with Zuck, and will probably directly impair him. I have a funny feeling Meta will become an unlikely ally in the resistance.

    • MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca
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      23 days ago

      This is exactly right. Musk is the Edison of the current era, and I mean that in all the worst ways possible.

      He’s just another trust fund schmuck with enough sense to pay someone smarter than him to do all the actual inventive shit, like Edison did (especially, but not exclusively to Nikola Tesla).

      IMO, it’s blasphemous that he owns a company named after Nikola Tesla.

        • MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca
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          22 days ago

          I’m sure Edison did some good things, but I did say that I meant my comment in all the worst ways.

          You can omit anything “good” that Edison did from my comparison, including any actual electrical engineering.

  • mtpender@lemmy.world
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    24 days ago

    He’s just a modern day Thomas Edison, the only thing he invented was a way to steal other people’s credit.

    • ristoril_zip
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      24 days ago

      Edison seemed to know it was important to leave science to scientists and engineering to engineers. Musk seems constitutionally incapable of respecting expertise.

      I’m sure Edison interfered here and there, it’s human nature to monkey with things.

      But to the level of Phony Stark? No way.

  • WaxedWookie@lemmy.world
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    23 days ago

    It’s pretty clear he’s had a hand in the Canyonero Cybertruck, and with Xitter’s strategy - they’re going great, right?

    …Oh

    …ohhhh nonono.

    • TheLowestStone@lemmy.world
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      23 days ago

      12 yards long, 2 lanes wide, 65 tons of American Pride!

      Canyonero! Canyonero!

      Top of the line in utility sports, Unexplained fires are a matter for the courts!

      Canyonero! Canyonero! (Yah!)

  • BarqsHasBite@lemmy.world
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    24 days ago

    Ever wonder why Musk’s talks about Tesla are so stilted? Because he didn’t do shit at the start, he doesn’t know anything about how it started.

    Listen to Tarpening and he talks in and out about EVs and Tesla’s business model. He knows because he did it. https://youtu.be/JW95LCkxlb4

    • GHiLA@sh.itjust.works
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      24 days ago

      His mind is the film Underworld on repeat, next to a bowl of pizza rolls, a PlayStation 2, and a stack of cyber-goth monthly with any attractive girl torn out and taped to the wall.

      • AnyOldName3@lemmy.world
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        24 days ago

        Surely PS1, or the Cybertruck could have had more polygons and the panels would line up because they didn’t need their vertices rounding to integer pixel coordinates.

  • webghost0101@sopuli.xyz
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    24 days ago

    Elon also has never lead a government. In case he starts saying that after the orange hits the ground.

    He is one thing and one thing only. A walking bankaccount that sells money for ego.