I am not very familiar with this founder and his company, but how does a guy like this make it past any level of due diligence on the part of his investors?
You clearly haven’t raised money from investors with that question. /j
Investors are sheep and follow their peers. There are only a handful of mavericks in investment circles, and they generate the best and the worst returns.
Consider that they all invested without seeing the engine or looking under the hood of the demo vehicle. It’s in the investor lawsuit — they even poke fun at themselves about it.
Bingo. You see this in public shareholder calls all the time. Today, you can't find a tech company that doesn't say something like "We are integrating AI with LLM into our technology to blah". They don't say that because it's a meaningful or good product, they say that because investors give you a 10% stock bump just for saying "LLM".
The same thing happened with crypto, machine learning, web 2.0, etc. Investors love a good buzzword and will reward a company handsomely for using them.
Hell, that's like 90% of the reason FTX became as big as it was.
My company just did a shareholder meeting. Of everything we described (and we had a KILLER year) basically the only questions that were asked revolved around our usage of LLMs. It didn't matter that we made a ton of money, new products, and happy customers. What mattered was how we are adding AI.
I say this only one-quarter sarcastically, I would genuinely like to know. The only real applications of LLMs that I have seen so far are devs "learning" new languages.
Part of our software has a data ingestion and normalization process that can be somewhat costly. Basically, on a near per client basis we get data that needs to be transformed into our data model. We are currently investigating into using LLMs to setup our normalization DSL (or at least fill it out as best it can before a human signs off on it).
There's also an investigation going on to allow a client to ask an LLM about there data. I'm not sure how well that one will pan out.
I'm feeling the "we need to adopt AI because it's the hot new thing/investors want to hear it" pressure at work nonstop, including some annoying mandatory trainings on it. My brother in Christ, I'm still trying to get my teammates to use git and package management, AI is going to have to wait a little bit.
To be completely honest ChatGPT would probably generate fewer vulnerabilities per line of code than my colleagues. Sadly that's not my call, and at least I get paid well to clean up their messes and put out their fires.
They did a SPAC in 2020 so his 'investors' were mostly the general public. Actual investors were pretty skeptical of them, e.g. Hindenburg shorted them extensively and called them a fraud.
Early investors aren't trying to find valuable, profitable, or innovative companies that will make a lot of money. Their goal is to sell to someone else at a higher price sometime down the line. Therefore the actual reality of the business is not useful, and often purposely ignored if the story seems like it can pull in enough bag holders.
Do you think he would have gotten that far in today's interest rate environment? I mean, are investors paying more attention now, or does the bigger idiot theory still work?
A theory I've read on here is that VC returns come from a handful of hyper-successful firms, and the challenge is getting in on the deals in those firms at all, and the way you do that is by building a reputation as a visionary and generous investor by investing in ludicrous bullshit on founder-friendly terms. From this point of view, money given to Nikola isn't a bad investment, it's a marketing expense.
I am not a Musk fan at all, in fact I despise Musk 4.0, but what he accomplished prior to losing his mind is undeniable. He founded SpaceX, which absolutely accelerated our access to space by 20-40 years. Half of the satellites in orbit belong to SpaceX. SpaceX put more mass into orbit last year than all other countries combined.
He accelerated the adoption of electric vehicles by at least ten years. If the worst of climate change predictions turn out to be true, this could make him one of the most beneficial humans of our time... that's assuming that his naive geopolitical angling doesn't kill us all, and that his brain implants don't turn us into corporate zombies.
My point is, there is much about him to criticize, but he has delivered a lot in the past.
If the worst of climate change predictions turn out to be true, this could make him one of the most beneficial humans of our time...
Not really. Methane from cows causes more harm to the environment than cars do. If he had gotten the world to go vegan, that would have been doing the impossible. Musk made an idea fashionable and sold carbon credits.
I mean, Musk went the practical route. Make things that nearly everyone wants... fast cars that you can refuel at home for next to no cost.
But I hear you about food. However, the sad joke is: we don't need vegan purity. If we could just convince everyone in wealthy countries to skip meat for only two days per week, then the we might actually hit 2C max temp increase. But everyone is all about paleo meat-only or vegan/vegetarian purity crap. We just needed some moderation, but that's not as sexy as being a vegan or a Hummer driver.
We will pilot our extremes straight into the ground.
Making people abstain from meat completely will turn people into the meat-eating equivalent of alcoholics. I bring up the comparison because sobriety is contingent on a period of continued abstinence along with veganism or vegetarianism. You will be mocked if you called yourself vegan and ate meat a few times a month, as you would be mocked if you called yourself sober and drank a few times a month.
Many people look at a lifetime of denying themselves a basic pleasure and rightly balk at the prospect and put it off to some distant 'later' or create a rationalization for why they don't need to do it. This wouldn't be nearly as much of a problem if we quit using absolutist terms like 'vegan' and instead came up with a way to make it a moral issue to acknowledge the problems associated with meat consumption without shaming those who limit it but do not abstain from it.
Basically -- advocating that the solution is a 'vegan' one is probably not going to work, and if it does it will create (at least initially) a population of guilt-ridden people and an associated culture of shame. Let's think of a better way to do it.
nobody's advocating that. I used the example of making the world go 100% vegan because it is an example of a thing which would be incredibly effective, yet which any reasonable person would consider impossible.
sure. but going the practical route isn't being some kind of hero. you don't go to a hero's gravestone and see the words "well, he did what he could."
Musk harnessed a very powerful desire which a lot of Americans share: to counteract climate change by buying stuff they like. If there's any credit to hand out, it's that desire which deserves it, especially since Musk answered the "buying stuff they like" part vigorously and the "counteracting climate change" part to a far lesser extent.
And then turned around and pretended to be more interested in the part he did less to accomplish.
All the scientifically relevant stuff would have gotten into space, Musk, SpaceX or not. All those Starlink satelites? I am still not convinced they provide any actual added value, besides giving SpaceX another product to raise funds against (Elon tried the same thing with FSD, which worked out less good so far).
Also, we were well on our path to EVs, Tesla (not Musk himself alone) accelerated that. Ten years so is bold claim, and attributing that all to one single person is just nonesense.
Edit: Tesla made shit tons of money by selling CO2 credits to legacy car makers, so in reality Musk (rather Tesla, but that distinctions is difficult) had close to no positive impact on climate change and instead profited of others continue to polute. All Musk cares about is his image as being the tech-god savior of mankind, that and money.
Oh, they work. Issue is, I know for a fact that there would have been alternative solutions for that. Or how do you think other militaries operate their communications?
