If anybody can give me some insight into what the rucksack they mean by "conmen" when using it to characterize Musk and Altman, I would be forever grateful.

A conman is someone who makes a promise, and later you find that your money is gone.

Musk has promised that every Tesla made will be able to be a Robotaxi (and earn money in your sleep); presumably some people purchased the car based at least in part on that promise. We now know that it will not happen.

Musk promised that “full self driving” would be available in 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025, and 2026. That has not happened, and multiple governments have required him to amend - or change - the term “full self driving” as it is not accurate as a descriptor of the service. In 2016 Musk staged a video of a “Full Self Driving” demonstration, which engineers later admitted had been preplanned and executed, and which was falsely described to the general public.

During a 2024 Optimus Robot demonstration the public was told that the robots were acting autonomously, when it was later revealed that they were being manipulated by off-stage human operators.

The famous Solar Tiles used in many demonstrations of the technology were later found to be (by court testimony from employees) staged mockup, non-functional props which never worked.

All of this (and more) has served to boost Tesla’s stock price to astronomical levels, always based on “what’s coming in the future”, although the future never seems to arrive as promised. The fact the the stock remains at lofty levels doesn’t make it true or false, part of the “con” in a con is that the mark doesn’t know about it until the denouement, which some of us expect has to happen at some point.

There is a history of stock manipulation for private gain, for instance the acquisition of Solar City to the detriment of Tesla shareholders for the purpose of bailing out his cousins; Solar City is still a meaningless component of the company, and likely always will be.

It’s worth noting that Tesla’s margins are no better than traditional car companies at this point; the short (but meaningful) era of super-charged margins is long past, yet the stock price hovers in the heavens based on “promises of the future.” One of those, for instance, is the Robotaxi, which was promised to be cheap to build (it isn’t), cheap to operate (it’s not), and a future gold mine like Uber (which it probably never will be, given that Uber has diminimus capital costs or operating expenses and Robotaxi does). But reasonable people can differ on business prospects, I acknowledge.

Now the buzz is on Robots, which are somehow going to be in everybody’s home, although Tesla has (once again) moved the goalposts back as to when that might happen. (Personally I expect an ever lengthening never actually ending window of availability, similar to that we saw of FSD) approaching “almost never” while the stock price continues to defy gravity because of the many TrueBelievers© who don’t care about usual stock metrics.

Yes, for the record, he done some amazing things, and that’s laudable. That he has “conned” people with many more things is also not really debatable.

If you’re truly interested, here’s a further post your might enjoy about the prospects of merging Tesla and SpaceX again, another feat of legerdemain for no apparent reason except stock price manipulation.

sykesix replies on Merger SPCX and TSLA?