Remember NFTs? This was an early attempt to use the blockchain to create valuable works of art. It was an interesting, sci-fi sort of idea that was undermined by both functional concerns (digital images are hard to “own”) and the sad fact that most of the art was terrible. This didn’t stop someone from paying as much as $69 million for one.
The theme of today’s Morning Dump news round-up is that I’m kind of over it. Tesla released its earnings report and did its investor call yesterday, and the quick takeaway is that the company made a little more in revenue, but somewhat predictably earned a lot less from that revenue. Was the call entirely focused on short-term fixes for this? Nope. But CEO Elon Musk did talk about who should be in control of his “robot army.”
You know the company most likely to take a big bite out of Tesla in the United States? It’s probably GM. I know that sounds a little crazy, but the company is going to market relatively soon with LIDAR-equipped cars, and I think this is a very big deal.
Would you believe that Volvo is kinda heading in the right direction? The troubled Swedish automaker seems to have (at least temporarily) reversed some of its fortunes. Can Stellantis change its trajectory? Our old pal Carlos Taveres has some feelings about it!
Elon Musk Explains You Can Use Multiple Slurp Juices On A Single Ape
I usually listen live to the Tesla quarterly investor call or, if I’m otherwise engaged, shortly thereafter. This quarter, I wasn’t as interested, as the actual quarterly report kinda said everything I needed to understand.
Tesla made more money than expected, largely on the backs of big sales ahead of the sunsetting of the EV tax credit. At the same time, earnings were down. The company did generate a huge free cash flow for the quarter of nearly $4 billion, though I’m curious to see if that trend magically reverses itself next quarter.
My plan was to read through the call when I saw this headline from Wired: “Elon Musk Wants ‘Strong Influence’ Over the ‘Robot Army’ He’s Building.”
Ok, so it’s going to be another one of those calls. Wired provides a good explanation of what’s happening here, claiming it’s related to Musk trying to get a potential trillion-dollar payday:
Musk has also made it clear that he wants to get paid, a lot. In November, Tesla shareholders will vote on the board’s proposal to pay the CEO a remarkable $1 trillion over the next decade. The deal would also increase Musk’s stake in Tesla from 13 percent to a quarter. But Musk would only get that big figure—and the extra control—if he hits a series of ambitious metrics, including 20 million vehicles delivered, 1 million robotaxis in commercial operation, and an $8.5 trillion valuation. And also, 1 million Optimus humanoid robots delivered.
On a call with investors on Wednesday, Musk locked on to that last point to make his most threatening argument for a gigantic payday yet. “My fundamental concern with regard to how much voting control I have at Tesla is, if I go ahead and build this enormous robot army, can I just be ousted at some point in the future?” he said. “If we build this robot army, do I have at least a strong influence over this robot army? Not control, but a strong influence … I don’t feel comfortable building that robot army unless I have a strong influence.”
This may be political, and David may remove it, but I don’t think anyone should have a trillion dollars or a robot army. Also, I think humanoid robots are kind of stupid. I fear this is like the Cybertruck, where the idea is much more interesting than the actual product, and the market just ends up being smaller than expected.
I’m not anti-tech. Roboticization is real, AI is real, ADAS is real, and all of it is important. Tesla seems to have a lot of advantages here, but the overall story of Tesla is a company that continues to promise a lot of things and not deliver them. [Ed Note: I don’t think that’s the overall story. I think the overall story of Tesla is that it built world-beating EVs/infrastructure that literally revolutionized the car world. Also it promised a bunch of stuff it either didn’t deliver or was late on. -DT].
AI and robots will replace all jobs.
Working will be optional, like growing your own vegetables, instead of buying them from the store.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 21, 2025
Just this week Musk promised that AI and robots would “replace all jobs.” Maybe! That’s a future that is very appealing to people who think they’ll get to be historically rich from building AI and robots and, at the same time, are deeply uncomfortable with actual human people.
You can read through the rest of the transcript to see there’s a lot less addressing some of Tesla’s core issues, and a lot more talk about all the things that will happen, eventually, someday…
It’s all becoming a just a little boring to me. All the promises. All the talk of a utopia that sounds increasingly like the opposite. It’s settling into a drone and persistent echo that rings a lot like “slurp juices” to my ears.
GM Could Beat Tesla To A Self-Driving Experience I’ll Trust
There’s a split in the world of Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) between people who think everything can be done with cameras and people who think you need advanced sensors like LIDAR.
I am firmly in the LIDAR camp. Cameras and basic ultrasonic sensors, radar, and super-precise GPS can return an experience that’s quite good as a sort of advanced cruise control. This is what GM’s SuperCruise does well.
Waymo, Volvo, and many Chinese automakers have turned to LIDAR-supported systems as the future for an experience that’s more like true self-driving.
GM announced last night that this is exactly where the company is going, starting in 2028 with the Cadillac IQ, which will get “eyes-off driving” on the vehicle for highways.
From a GM press release:
Unlike vision-only systems, GM’s approach is built on redundancy with lidar, radar, and cameras integrated into the vehicle’s design. At the core is sensor fusion: the lidar, radar, and cameras build the perception layer; real-world driving data trains the decision-making model; and high-fidelity simulation validates performance across rare or hazardous scenarios. This provides a safe, reliable, and highly capable eyes-off autonomous system.
GM’s foundation in Super Cruise proves that this kind of complex driver-assist technology can scale safely. Since its debut in 2017, Super Cruise has expanded to 23 vehicle models, enabling more than 700 million hands-free miles with zero reported crashes attributed to the system.
The other big feature is “conversational AI,” which is something that’s becoming more popular in China, where consumers are using a lot more voice activation to solve HMI issues.
Volvo Is Kind Of Killing It Right Now
If you’ve gotten this far and are yearning for a Butlerian Jihad, then this next joke will appeal to you. Hakan Samuelsson, the automotive CEO who sounds most like a character who was actually around for the Butlerian Jihad, has a reason to celebrate.
The Volvo leader retired from the company, only to be dragged back to help save it from the abyss. His big strategy was just to cool everyone’s jets and cut back on employees. That’s not a long-term strategy, but it seems to have worked great in the short-term.
Volvo Cars, based in Sweden but majority-owned by China’s Geely Holding (GEELY.UL), said it made an operating profit before one-off costs of 5.9 billion Swedish crowns ($627 million) in July-September, soaring above analysts’ consensus forecast of 1.6 billion crowns, according to Bernstein.
This was despite a 7% drop in sales, with fully electric cars still accounting for less than a quarter of the total.
Volvo Cars shares were up 32% at 0842 GMT, on track for one of their strongest daily performances on record and returning to levels not seen since July 2024.
Volvo is weirdly in a decent position because it has a factory in the United States that exports cars. It sounds like the plan is to use it for more domestic production of hybrids, which makes sense.
Ex-Stellantis Boss Says He Sees Company Being Broken Up In The Future
Ex-Stellantis CEO Carlos Taveras, pictured above, is back in the news. He’s got a new book out (it’s only in French currently) that can be translated to “A Captain in the Storm,” which is hilarious given that I’d argue he actively steered his ship further into a tempest.
Oh well. Someone at Bloomberg read it and pulled this little bit out:
Carlos Tavares, in a new book, says that the group’s French, Italian and US operations might have to go their separate ways if the maker of Jeep sport utility vehicles and Fiat cars fails to withstand pressures from various stakeholders in its home bases.
Within Stellantis, “I am worried that the three-way balance between Italy, France and the US will break,” Tavares said in a book published Thursday in France. The group’s survival as a standalone company will depend on management paying attention to unity “every day” given the risk of being pulled in multiple directions.
Tavares seems to be complimentary of his successor, Antonio Filosa, but added this:
“With me gone, I am not sure that the French interests that I always had at heart — whether you believe it or not — will be as well defended,” Tavares said in the book.
Never change, Carlos!
What I’m Listening To While Writing TMD
Sudan Archives is back with a very club-inflected album called The BPM. The song “A Bug’s Life” is a good entry and feels like a very throwback ’90s electronic song, layered with the artist’s energetic violin playing. I dig it.
The Big Question
What is your experience with ADAS systems? Do you have a car with one? Have you driven a car with one? Have you never even used cruise control?
Top photo: Tesla/The Boring Company
This is an incredible shot from GM. For those not aware, Tesla is effectively the ONLY company doing vision-only ADAS. And from a raw engineering standpoint, a multi-technology, redundant, sensor-fused approach is the only way to deliver truly reliable and safe driverless ADAS. Vision only is a complete fools errand.
Re: Tesla earning ands stock valuation. I think I can finally start to wrap my head around the batshit evaluation of Tesla, and the truly bizarre behavior of it’s shareholder base. Much has been said about Tesla stock equals a bid of faith to Musk. For the past few years I have held that Tesla’s current engineering/product direction is skewing more and more away from reality, and I believe more firmly in that as time goes on. Their technology is based on poor assumptions driven straight down from Elon and his yes-men, rather than the engineers.
The problem with my viewpoint is that I’m an engineer by degree and trade. The average investor is not. Nor are many futurists, Tesla fanboys, and other hardcore Tesla fanatics. At a minimum they do not have as much of a background in this tech as I have. What most investors and Tesla bears seem to not grasp is that yes, Elon’s companies have an incredible track record for revolutionizing their industries (early Tesla, spaceX, etc). What they cannot grasp is that Elon’s companies have a deep parallel to the current state of the US government, the guardrails are off, the captain has lost his mind, and none of his supporting crew can raise so much as a finger in protest before being blasted off the crew.
What used to make Tesla incredible was it’s lean team, able to implement engineering improvements at record pace. The reality now is Elon dictates every step of the product roadmap and core technological decision making, not the engineers. That’s why we have the Cybertruck, Vision Only ADAS, and a lineup that has it’s biggest sellers growing uncompetitive by the day. Tesla has lost it’s way, but the investors are too fueled by greed and blind faith to know any better.
I’ve used FSD in various iterations on my HW4 Model Y. Subscribing for a month at a time for road trips when it can be used. No towing with FSD. The v14 is by far the best yet. For highway and suburban driving. It’ll dodge squirrels, move over for stopped vehicles and stays 2 seconds behind vehicles. It also does a much better job of driving like the prevailing traffic conditions. Yes, I tried Mad Max mode on a fairly empty highway. Meh? Still wasn’t the fastest car. Big Altima Energy wins again. I do like Sloth Mode for staying exactly at the posted speed limit. That’s really nice for photo-ticketed construction zones.
It still has a bunch of downsides. It still depends on map data too much. It insists on driving on a field that used to be a road two years ago despite successfully using the new road to get there. Or cutting through a parking lot when the main road is right there. Those areas were both deserted at the time. That vividly made my point to my offspring to not fully trust a computer’s decision making! And the cameras need to be squeaky clean. It does nag to clean them, which is an improvement.
Overall, it’s still 2/3 baked. Can’t rely on it in all situations. It’s a great fancy cruise control. I won’t be renewing until the next camperless 500 mile one way road trip.
When Bernie Sanders said “billionaires shouldn’t exist”, people lambasted him, as if they were about to become billionaires themselves.
Now that Lone Skum is going to be a trillionaire, they’re changing their tune. “”Well, that’s different”.
ADAS is one of the many things that as an engineer I find to be highly interesting, but as a consumer I don’t have much if any interest. Driving/experimenting with some pre-production Audis with adaptive cruise control one summer back in college was a blast (we confirmed on the highway that the radar indeed did not work at less than 2m following distance). The DARPA grand challenge (I had no involvement, but followed it a bit) around the same time was really cool. But the few times fighting with lane keeping while dodging pot holes, or having a rental car constantly flipping out during normal driving makes me have zero desire to have anything beyond basic cruise control, and maybe really well sorted emergency braking, in a personal vehicle.
Both of our cars have adaptive cruise and lane keep assist and both require constant supervision.
I couldn’t wait to turn off the lane assist in my GR Corolla. I couldn’t figure out why it was fighting me if I had to do a quick change without turn signal when Karen was busy updating Pinterest while merging onto I-75.
I signal with each lane change anyways (I just stick my pinky out to catch the stalk as I’m spinning the wheel) so that doesn’t bother me as much as when you hit a stretch where the paint is worn away or there’s a really prominent seam that that the computer assumes is a lane marking and suddenly jerks you to the right without warning.
My favorite was the time I got hit by a sudden squall which instantly knocked visibility to nothing and gave everybody a pop-quiz on how to handle hydroplaning. It was all I could do to keep the car pointed in one direction with both hands on the wheel and couldn’t go hunting around for the button to disable the assistant. I tend to keep it off now.
Team LIDAR here. It doesn’t require AI decisions to be made based on multiple possibly faulty camera images that are fed into buggy software.
The adaptive cruise in the ’17 Golf R I had was OK. The adaptive cuise in the wife’s ’18 Acura TLX sucks. LKAS blows in every vehicle I’ve driven with it, with a tendency to pull the steering wheeel when it doesn’t need to be or when I actively don’t want it to. I always shut it off.
Elon is nuttier than a fruitcake at this point. I can’t even with the robot army crap. He’s the last person in the world I would even want to be in charge of an army of robots that answers only to him. T-1000 anyone?
Honda’s adaptive cruise is oddly aggressive when it comes to braking.
Only if it’s a Pontiac T–1000!
I dont feel comfortable with anyone building the robot army IF Elon has any control of it.
Also, I am very ADAS specific. I generally don’t do any ADAS, no Park assist, no Lane Keep assist etc. BUT, I have loved SuperCruise when I have had the chance to use it. I would use it everyday on my long commute.
Also Also, LiDar is the answer to anything beyond Level 2 systems. Well, actually, Lidar, Camera, radars, GPS is the answer together. They all solve different problems that must be solved for real Level 3 and beyond. Elon, is, as usual, completely wrong about using camera only and it shows, considering FSD is just not able to move from a hands on system.
What is cruise control for 200$ Alex?
I’ve gone definitively backwards on my embrace of tech. Instead of a new car I bought one from the mid 2000s that had an aftermarket car play unit in it. The car is manual and doesn’t even have cruise control. It has all the features I need. I’m unwilling to use internet of things devices for anything more important than automated feeding of my barn cats.
Automated driving is neat I guess but I just don’t trust it.
I certainly don’t see how I would ever want a humanoid robot in my household. Especially one that is directly or indirectly controlled by Musk, and I’m not even sure how there’s enough people that see this as the future to support the stock price.
Tldr: I’m thinking the people who are going as far off grid as possible are seeming more correct with every passing day.
Do you ever just stop and think, “These are the guys we’ve socially rewarded to the highest degree?”. Elon is already preparing his non-existent robo-army for the Senate to vote him an Enemy of The State. So, he can march his robo-legion across the Rubicon hoisting the Golden Eagle.
This man has left reality about three exits ago. This is not the organized, lucid thought process of a functional person. This man is so deep down the K-hole the Devil is his upstairs neighbor. Why are we tolerating these crazed rantings as some sort of tea-readings of the Tech Priest. Stating AI will replace all jobs is such as gross misunderstanding of just the basic function of society. Sticking a fork in a socket is objectively a demonstration of higher cognitive function.
But, yet, we hang on to their every word. Because in-between the Thiel rants about Greta Thunburg being the anti-Christ, and Elon prepping the Robo- Elephants for the Alps. These absolutely strange human beings have unfortunately been given the ability to directly impact our lives. So may we all render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to Elon the things that are Elon’s.
If I was as hated as him I’d want a robot army as well.
Any sane business person involved with Tesla would say “You are a Tesla employee. The robot program belongs to Telsa. The robots, if we build them, belong to Tesla. You’ll be involved with the program only as long as you need to be”. But when you own the board I guess you get to decide what you do.
Ah, so he didn’t care about the company as a whole, so much as he cared about protecting the part of the company that used to be Peugeot. I mean, that was already self evident, but it feels a little like saying the quiet part loud, for someone ostensibly hired to run the entire company on behalf of all shareholders
Will GM’s LIDAR system damage camera sensors like the current taxi-looking Volvo SUV? I’m a huge fan of moving away from sight only ADAS, but I don’t want my phone, dash cam, and camera getting ruined just because they got pointed in the wrong direction in public.
This is an excellent question. Filters and polorization might help, but also have limitations due all light being waves and angles effectively stretching and shrinking waves. I really, really hope the two can coexist nicely.
In the 50s, Arthur C. Clarke predicted that automation would get to the point where working would be optional, many things would be free, and people would live off a Universal Basic Income (he didn’t call it that). Clarke was a very smart person, but forgot how many people are rich, cheap assholes. That’ll never happen, Art.
There is a book by Ray Kurzweil, a futurist, called The Age of Spiritual Machines. This book being from the turn of the millennium, you can see where he was right and wrong over the years.
He claims in that book that UBI will be common – “in the developed world” – by the early 2030s, and throughout the rest of the world by the end of that decade. Even given his track record, I could never fathom people like my parents (young Boomers) being OK with UBI. Over the past year especially, I see it as less and less a possibility in the US in the next 20 years at least.
I honestly could see UBI becoming a thing in the US, but less so for the purposes of lifting anyone out of poverty and more so as a way of keeping us subservient to the 5 corporations that control everything. You don’t have to worry about people doing irresponsible things like saving for the future or donating to charity if you give them just enough to pay for their treats and streaming services.
That was Ben Bova’s basic prediction in his sci-fi novels.
I see it from slightly more dystopian perspective as posited in the series “The Expanse”.
For the day’s question, I’ve gone as far as using lane-keep assist and radar-assisted cruise control and they’re…fine. They do what they are supposed to, but I really don’t see much benefit. I’d rather control my gas pedal on my own and I’m definitely good doing my own steering.
I feel like the adaptive cruise just encourages complacency, since you can easily stop monitoring your speed and just end up settling in behind someone. If you aren’t thinking about your speed, are you thinking about the rest of your driving responsibilities? At least with regular cruise, you have to pay attention to your speed relative to traffic.
I absolutely love my adaptive cruise, precisely because it takes that bit off my plate. If I get behind someone going slower, the car takes care of it, and I can then spend that energy looking at traffic to make a move if possible. If I’m in a construction zone or heavier traffic where no one is going my preferred speed, I get to keep a good following distance at the flow of traffic without trying.
My only issue is that Mazda made the choice to be quite aggressive at keeping the chosen following distance, so any time someone comes into the lane, I’m left apologizing to The Wife, and insisting it’s not me slamming on the breaks, it’s the car! lol
I find myself nannying the adaptive cruise more than normal cruise, anticipating what the vehicle will do based off what’s going on around it and then trying to compensate. Like, if someone moves in front of me, the car could brake heavily. If someone moves out from in front of me, the car might floor it to get to the speed that I set. It does these things in an annoying and unnatural way. I honestly find normal cruise easier and use it far more frequently. Adaptive is nice in certain situations sometimes.
So, working will become optional? Where am I supposed to get my money to buy all the stuff that robots produce? And this from a guy who wants a 1 trillion payday, on top of his 500 billion fortune. Please keep in mind Elon is they guy who said working from home was immoral. But, having that amount of wealth isn’t. Now, I’m not anti wealth, I really love money, but to get to this point is really skewing reality.
As a guest on Lex Friedman said “Our current society is following the self destructive path that Rome went down.”
Anyone who loves money enough to obtain a net worth with a B in front of it is deranged
Only about 1,000 years faster
Thats from all the efficiency we have developed!
Also,
Laces out!
Yeah, the Star Trek post-scarcity society isn’t really the route this seems to be heading with all the wealth-hoarding. If there aren’t jobs for everyone, I don’t see them setting up a system with everyone having enough to survive, much less have enough to enjoy life.
This was my exact thought as well. Sure, he’s chasing all that wealth, and then claims that working will be optional, like a hobby. Of course I would grow my own food over buying it at the store if I was unemployed and couldn’t, you know, actually buy anything!
“I’m not anti-tech.”
Good for you. I am, wholeheartedly. These people are trying to destroy the world and inflicting crimes against humanity on a biblical scale. The sooner this bubble pops and all the absolute freaks like Musk, Zuckerberg, Altman, Bezos, etc. get locked in padded rooms for the remainder of their disturbed lives the better.
I feel like I’ve become more anti-tech daily over the past couple years.
I went from “hey some of this is pretty neat” to “please stop over engineering solutions to problems that don’t exist or have already been solved” to “these people will actually kill us all if we don’t stop them” over the course of 5-10 years.
Yup. Same here. Even on stuff that feels less nefarious I’m getting annoyed at- for example I prefer the plug in carplay in my 18 Miata to the wireless carplay in my 22 Accord because the Miata’s works flawlessly every time. The Accord takes too long to connect (if it does at all).
This. I think the introduction of technology has gone from “this is really cool and useful” to “okay, so it’s slightly better and I’m forced to buy it because you stopped supporting this one”.
I was also wondering how if all these resources for new tech was used on the base level human improvements (food production, education, health), what could be solved? Like if all the computing power for AI was dedicated to the collaborative commuting projects like folding, etc. What could they solve with that massive amount of processing power?
So much of technology has gone from “this product solves XYZ problem by being well to designed” to “Hey we can slap a microcontroller with a Wi-Fi antenna on this cheap thing, mark it up 3x, and obsolete it in 4 years”. which is why if it’s got “smart” features, I don’t buy it.
We need to get back to being Luddites. Not in the “I’m just anti-technology” way, but in the… other way.
Luddites were not anti-technology per se. Luddites were people who wanted a living wage, and objected to how textile machinery devalued their labor. My interpretation is Luddites wanted management to distribute the extra value textile machinery created more equitably.
In today’s world, I would argue that content creators railing against the appropriation of their IP to create AI are modern Luddites, and seek to collect the value they created now being repackaged as AI output.
I’ve gone from ‘the future is going to be cool’ to ‘oh goddamnit.’
I’m generally pro tech, but anti tech-bro having spent the majority of my career working with and for them. You can lump a good 70% of people in tech into that bucket as the majority are one successful startup away from becoming a member of the sect.
Yesterday I drove a 2025 BZ4X that did fairly well with Lane-Keeping Assist when the roads were straight and clear, but the car freaked out two separate times, once when the 25-mph-limit took a not-unreasonably sharp S turn, and once when there was a work truck parked on the sidewalk on a straight-line arterial. Scared the hell out of me. Plus on those straightaways I only got about thirty seconds before the “take control” message came on, effectively telling me that I had to make a turn for the car to keep going straight.
So yeah, not quite there yet.
But at least the LKA was better than my funtodrive2020HondaCRV, which lets me go longer before trying to get me to take over, but isn’t sensitive enough to recognize that my minute adjustments ARE me driving, and doesn’t seem to recognize any lanes that aren’t clearly marked on both sides (which would have me drifting into shoulders and ditches where the stripes have faded).
That said, Adaptive Cruise Control is pretty smooth on both vehicles (which is to say “not scary,” although it does in both cars actually apply the brakes (gently) to slow down when somebody changes lanes in front of you, which I don’t like at freeway speeds).
Neither vehicle has systems robust enough for me to trust them to drive in any conditions.
So, if AI and robots do “all the jobs” who will consume their output? In other words if the newly under -or- unemployed labor force can’t afford to buy what the ‘bots are making, what’s the point?
Assuming we do get to this point (color me doubtful) it would also require a massive reworking of society, and not just the job market.
I saw something that IIRC said 150 years ago, something like 95% of the population was involved in food production. All we had were horses and small farms. Now it’s something like less than 4% is involved with food production, because everything is mechanised. With increased automation, it will drop even more.
Society changes in ways we can’t anticipate, but my guess is life would look a lot like that space ship from the move Wall-E.
That picture of the Optimus robot is exactly how I imagine Musk responding any time he gets sued, fined, criticized, or told he has to take his shoes off when he comes inside your house..
I’ve been in the humanoid robotics industry for a few years now (not on purpose, and fortunately I’ve been transitioning away from it), and I fully agree that humanoid robots are kind of stupid.
There are plenty of reasons to believe this, but the best analysis I’ve heard is from Ken Goldberg, who is credited with the “100,000 year data gap.”
Essentially, we’ve seen impressive displays from text and image generating AI, even to the point of basically passing the Turing test. But the models that have gotten there are trained on what amounts to 100,000 years of data – meaning it would take a human 100,000 years to read or view all of that data. That’s fairly easy to do, because there’s a massive amount of visual and text data out there and you can get an AI model to go through it very quickly with enough computing power.
To get to “general purpose” robots, or robots that can be directed to do an unstructured manipulation task in the same way that practically any human can do, you need 100,000 years of data to train the AI that controls the manipulation. But that data doesn’t exist, and is extremely difficult to produce. Simulation can do quite a bit, but manipulation simulation is notoriously inaccurate.
So while mechanically we’ve solved some pretty amazing problems to get to a robot with what appears to be human-like capabilities, that tool is useless without a general-purpose AI controlling it. And we are nowhere near achieving that.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scirobotics.aea7390
Elon continues to master misdirection and distraction. Lack of the ability to deliver on promises doesn’t seem to affect his companies’ valuation.
Just imagine if Honda would have made the same claims with Asimo.
Bro is out here pitching a Star Trek TNG-style utopia where money is no longer needed and working is optional but he supports a political party that wants to drug test people so they can get $50 worth of food stamps.
A political party staffed by bozos that can’t even pass a drug or alcohol screening themselves, no less! You think goddamn Pete Hegseth, Kash Patel, or Elon Musk could get through the HR process to get a regular ass desk job? Of course not.
Kash Patel would at least be somewhat hirable due to his skills in telekinesis and ability to read minds.
Not to mention his uncanny ability see life in real time 270 degrees.
“I think humanoid robots are kind of stupid” I did too until I saw this iteration https://robotics.hexagon.com/product/ Making the “feet” as wheels makes so much more sense, as it can scoot around without awkwardly walking, but still step over an obstacle if it needs to. If Amazon intends to replace people in warehouses that are already built for people, it makes sense just to have more efficient people-scale robots.
Jim Jones got people to drink the Kool-Aid but Musk has them buying Costco hot dogs for 13 bucks at the LA GigaDiner. The man is truly without peer when it comes to inspiring rabid devotion.
Regarding the peer thing, um… something something orange Kool-Aid?
It was actually Flavor-Aid, the cheaper knockoff of Kool Aid
Rampant rabid devotion… I can think of one individual on a similar level, just so happens to be a former friend of Elon.