What is your opinion of Elon Musk?

Kooky genius, I kind of like him, too. Eccentric rich guys are interesting.

^^^Same here. He is pretty popular here in the SF Bay area.

Brilliant guy, lots of ideas. But inconsistent on follow through.

He needs better middle managers so he can spend his time thinking.

An artistic genius!

thumbs up!

Pretty cool guy if you can ignore his role at PayPal and his working with Peter Thiel.

This is one of the coolest things I have ever seen.

And I do hope the electric semi thing takes off.

He sued Top Gear twice, unsuccessfully, after they gave one of his cars a bad review.
He is an arsehole, who now can not even get car production right.

@Ragingloli You never fail to surprise me!

I don’t have an opinion of Elon Musk.

I loved the touch of humor with the car going into orbit! Too often really smart people tend to lack humor.

He has more money than sense. I heard he wants to establish a colony on Mars which is crazy.

Every wild thing any one ever wanted to try was considered “crazy.”

Don’t mistake me, I think Space X is doing great things for the furtherance of human spaceflight. The development of proven reusable rockets is an absolute must. But I don’t really have an opinion of the man himself.

Just another rich white American man. I don’t have an opinion either way.

Well, his mom is from Canada and his dad is from South Africa…

annd

“Musk attended Waterkloof House Preparatory School, and Bryanston High School[44] before graduating from Pretoria Boys High School. He moved to Canada in June 1989, just before his 18th birthday,[45] after obtaining Canadian citizenship through his Canadian-born mother.”

I prefer Patchouli but to each his (or her) own.

Actually, he’s from South Africa @RedDeerGuy1. When he was 17 he moved to Canada to attend University. I think he holds both Canadian and American citizenship.

@ragingloli He’s consistently done the impossible. That Top Gear smear job was dismissed because the show was about entertainment and didn’t have to be held to any standards of accuracy in their depictions thus the dismissals. That doesn’t mean the show wasn’t full of shit.

It’s not like there isn’t huge incentives to try to smear electric cars either. John Broder got caught pulling all kinds of BS in his review trying to make the Model S look bad. Tesla had logs from his trip which directly contradicted his article:

“The logs show that Broder intentionally failed to charge his car properly, and even drove around a parking lot in an attempt to drain the car’s battery. Despite claiming to set cruise control at 54 mph and turning off the heat to conserve battery life, the logs show that Broder did neither — instead, he turned the heat up to 74F (23C) and drove at speeds between 65 and 81 mph for most of the trip… It gets better. According to Tesla’s logs, Broder’s Model S never actually ran out of battery, including when he called out a tow truck. It would seem that Broder completely fabricated that portion of the story, simply to fuel the flames of electric range anxiety. This isn’t to say that Broder didn’t try to run the car flat: He drove around a tiny parking lot in Milford, Connecticut for 0.6 miles while the car told him he had zero miles remaining. When the car refused to die, he eventually headed over to the Milford Supercharging facility.”

Big oil and big auto have no interest in electric cars, the latter being dragged forward kicking and screaming producing compliance cars.

And yeah there are some production challenges as Tesla tries to go from producing ~31.5k of just the Model S in 2014 to ~101k Model S & Model X cars, plus ~2.5k Model 3’s in 2017. But we’re talking about production slipping about 3–6 months, which is pretty minuscule in the big picture. Musk tends to set big, ambitious goals publicly and often falls behind his own timelines, but he’s still way ahead of where he would have been if he’d set more achievable goals and not created pressure on his team to deliver the impossible.

But…driving around isn’t going to discharge the battery! Quite the opposite.

@Dutchess_III That is how electric cars work. The battery will be drained of all energy when it reaches its limit (somwhere between 210 to 315 miles for a Tesla Model S).

Oh oh! I see. Thanks.

No enthusiastic opinion except he seems like a cool rich guy who is trying to do good things and fun things like space industry stuff and launching a car in space.

Dual citizenship in America and South Africa, I believe. I think we need more zany mavericks personally.

And Canadian too, I think.