Tech Oil Salesman Elon Musk’s $182 Billion Net Worth Loss Breaks World Record, Gets a Third Back after YEETing Cool People from Twatter

CNBC:

Elon Musk can add a new title to his resume: Guinness World Record holder.

The “Technoking” of Tesla made it into the record books thanks to an abysmal 2022 which saw his fortune shrink by $182 billion, the organization announced Friday in a release that cited data from Forbes.

Guinness noted that although “the exact figure [of Musk’s loss] is almost impossible to ascertain,” with some outlets estimating that he lost more than $200 billion, the Twitter owner demolished the previous record: a $58.6 billion loss by Japanese investor Masayoshi Son in 2000.

Musk’s shrinking fortune was largely due to the steep slide of Tesla shares, which lost roughly 65% of their value during the company’s worst year on record.

Tesla shares lost almost two thirds of their value? What could possibly have caused that?

Contrary to the picture, I don’t think it’s the Tesla Semi. I wrote about what a steaming pile of garbage that is, but it’s a fairly minor disaster for them. Anyone who was duped into thinking it wouldn’t be a meme vehicle was delusional. I’m sure there was some stock price bump due when factoring that in, but I doubt it was much. 

Probably more relevant is the absurd promises of autonomous driving. Thunderf00t has an decent video on this, but in short, Tesla promised for almost a full decade that they would have fully self-driving cars next year. Below we see a video from August last year where Independent tested their self-driving abilities and saw it absolutely holocaust a child dummy. 

Making the whole thing even better there is a competitor, Luminar Tech, that does not murder the small child. This is in part because they use LIDAR, or laser imaging, detection, and range. Everyone else who was working on autonomous driving said that you absolutely needed lidar. But GENIUS SUPERSTAR Elon Musk knew better. 

Jaime, can we see the results again please?

Here we see the small child (dummy) minding its own business. 

And here we see the Tesla YEETing it out of existence. Great job Elon.

I get what Fake Genius Boy was thinking. When humans drive and steer they don’t need LIDAR, RADAR, ultrasonic waves, or any other distance measurement device. All we need is functioning eyeballs and a brain. Therefore, all you need to do is build something that outcompetes the human neck, eyeballs, and brain combination that is the result of millions of years of evolution, and with no other sensors to give you an advantage. 

I know this is hard for people who are really full of shit to understand, but the human visual/brain system is really good. I had to explain this in my Fighter Plane series when deboonking long range drones (short range ones serve a purpose). If you just renamed the eyeballs-neck-brain combination to a “dual redundant range finding electro-optical imaging device with near instantaneous tracking and refocusing,” the military NPCs would cream their pants. But that’s just me describing a random guy in a cockpit looking around.

The best way to improve an unmanned plane is to put a guy in it. The best way to improve self-driving cars is to have a guy drive them.

Tech Crunch:

Tesla plans to add a new radar product to its vehicles in mid-January, according to documents posted with the Federal Communications Commission.

The disclosure, which was first reported by Electrek, comes as the company faces scrutiny over the safety and capabilities of its standard advanced driver assistance system known as Autopilot and the $15,000 optional upgraded product branded as “Full Self-Driving.” Tesla FSD beta software offers some automated driving features but is not a self-driving system.

The luxury EV-maker has long claimed it could reach full autonomy through a “vision only” approach that shuns other sensors like lidar and radar in favor of cameras and a deep neural network that quickly processes a vehicle’s surroundings and responds in real time. Tesla CEO Elon Musk previously promised to “solve” full self-driving by the end of this year (he’s also promised Tesla would get there every year for roughly nine years now). He has recently admitted the problem will take longer to solve.

Let’s take a look at Tesla’s claim from 2021 that they could get by with a visual system only.

Tech Crunch:

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has been teasing a neural network training computer called “Dojo” since at least 2019. Musk says Dojo will be able to process vast amounts of video data to achieve vision-only autonomous driving. While Dojo itself is still in development, Tesla today revealed a new supercomputer that will serve as a development prototype version of what Dojo will ultimately offer. 

Dear God. Please, make it stop. I can’t deal with fake problem solving of this magnitude.

At the 2021 Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition on Monday, Tesla’s head of AI, Andrej Karpathy, revealed the company’s new supercomputer that allows the automaker to ditch radar and lidar sensors on self-driving cars in favor of high-quality optical cameras. During his workshop on autonomous driving, Karpathy explained that to get a computer to respond to a new environment in a way that a human can requires an immense data set, and a massively powerful supercomputer to train the company’s neural net-based autonomous driving technology using that data set. Hence the development of these predecessors to Dojo.

Machine learning cars being thrown onto the road. 

I wrote a piece back in February of 2022 on Tesla’s neural net AI getting trivially easily spoofed by three white dots. The next day I wrote a piece on Starcraft 2 and the neural net bot AI that totally cheated its way to victory over the best human players.

I won’t rehash the entirety of those piece here, but it’s very important to understand that neural nets can often get stuck optimizing towards a local maximum, instead of the correct answer. That’s why Google’s Deepmind AI taught itself to run like a complete and utter goofball. It figured out how to not fall over with some bizarre asymmetrical thing that kind of worked, and had no way to make all the right changes to get to the right running stride.

On top of that, neural nets are famous for false positives. And if you try hard to get rid of these false positives you then get a bunch of false negatives. For some workloads this is fine. For others, it could be disastrous. 

Finally, neural nets are almost impossible to improve. They don’t tell you how they got the result they got, unlike a hand crafted algorithm. Instead they are a black box that can only be improved with exponentially more hardware and data sets thrown at the problem. 

Tesla’s newest-generation supercomputer has 10 petabytes of “hot tier” NVME storage and runs at 1.6 terrabytes per second, according to Karpathy. With 1.8 EFLOPS, he said it might be the fifth most powerful supercomputer in the world, but he conceded later that his team has not yet run the specific benchmark necessary to enter the TOP500 Supercomputing rankings.

Turns out the fifth most powerful computer in the world can’t make the idiotic camera + neural net setup work without derping its owner to death along with innocent toddlers. Why was Elon so set on this?

I need to transcribe that tweet.

Sensors are a bitstream and cameras have several orders of magnitude more bits/sec than radar (or lidar).

Radar must meaningfully increase signal/noise of bitstream to be worth complexity of integrating it. As vision processing gets better, it just leaves radar far behind.

Musk is basically the cuck right version of Malcolm Gladwell. He’s got just as many asinine snuck in premises as the traffic antifas, and what he said here is so dumb that I’m honestly too baffled to immediately respond. He starts off jibbering about “sensors are a bitstream,” and then something something “cameras more bits/second,” something something “signal/noise ratio.” 

At no point in time does he explain that the thing which radar/LIDAR is measuring, distance, is done with drastically more accuracy than camera processing. That’s why air traffic controllers all use radar instead of just having a bunch of cameras all over the place, and would even if the skies were completely blue. That’s why fighter planes have radars in their noses, instead of just relying on the pilots vision. If the sensor gives you unique and different information then it doesn’t need to have some arbitrary high bitrate. 

To put into perspective just how dumb what he said was, imagine that you’re trying to create a system that takes what people in a room say and automatically transcribes it. You would naturally think that you should focus most of your effort on the audio capturing and processing part, with a secondary focus on using a series of cameras to help with lip syncing. But what Musk would tell is you is that the visual part has more bitrate. Therefore you’re dumb to even bother capturing the audio of the room.

Bloomberg:

Elon Musk sold another $3.58 billion worth of Tesla Inc. shares, bringing the total amount he’s offloaded since late last year to almost $40 billion.

Weird, I thought he said he wouldn’t sell any Tesla stock.

I guess that was as real of a promise as solar panel roofs, or self-driving cars.

Musk’s remaining stake in Tesla — roughly $94 billion — still makes up almost 60% of his total net worth, according to the index. Around $57 billion of that is shares he owns outright, and the remainder is vested stock options he’s received from a 2018 mega grant.

Tesla is going to go down in history as one of the most outrageously overvalued companies of all time, as well as one of the most taxpayer subsidized. 

They had an almost two decade head start on the electric vehicle market. In that time, the only good decision they made was to parasitize off of your tax dollars. Well not quite, building a proprietary charging network was arguably a good business decision, even if an obvious anti-consumer one. In the EU he has to let other vehicles charge there. In the US he gets paid $7.5 billion by your tax dollars to let a tiny amount of competitor vehicles charge there.

And it’s only 10% of the charging network…

This is the equivalent of Ford owning the majority of gas stations, and only letting Ford vehicles gas up there, while Ford vehicles can also gas up at normal gas stations. It’s blatantly anti-consumer, but that’s what you gotta do when you’re saving the planet.

The build quality of their cars still sucks, and the handling is absolute trash, although that is true for all electric vehicles due to their terrible weight. Instead of fixing the garbage interior, genius boy Elon Musk decided that he was going to reinvent the steering wheel, but dumber.

I had a whole little bit written about this thing, but seriously, just look at it. Look at how dumb it is.

Luckily some people found a solution.

Market Watch:

And Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk no doubt fits that bill, following some dramatic swings in his personal fortune over the past few years.

But as of Thursday, he was worth $191 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. That makes him the second-richest person in the world, just behind the man who currently wears that crown — Bernard Arnault, founder and chief executive officer of luxury goods giant LVMH Moet Hennessy The French business magnate is worth $192 billion, a mere billion more than Musk.

Year-to-date, the head of Tesla and Twitter and the founder of SpaceX and the Boring Company, has seen his wealth climb by $54.2 billion. That’s as shares of his electric-car maker have found their way back into investors’ favor after 2022 turned into the worst year ever for the stock.

But I guess Musk kissed the asses of all the right (((people))) by censoring all the of )))wrong((( people. He can now go back to being a parasite who lives off your taxdollars and transparent fraud about self-driving cars, solar roofs, etcetera.

In this society it’s better to be privileged than competent.