“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.
  https://​www.​shrewdm.​com/​MB?​pid=​791104621