> that anyone realized

Not to be pedantic, but lots of people "realized" (or predicted) this, myself included.

He promised something, charged for it, and had little to show for. To me that's a big mistake, not little "ooopsie shit happens".

And it's not clear this will be fixed 10 years from now. Experimental research often fails in some stage between research and production.

Rocketry and self-driving are completely different domains of difficulty. Rocketry is a solved problem - the basic math works, we've done it before, the challenge now is building upon that knowledge, refining it and increasing efficiency, but the basics have been figured out and proven since we've launched the first satellites in orbit. SpaceX is successfully doing this.

Unsupervised self-driving in an unconstrained environment is a completely different game. The reason humans can drive is that they have millions of years of evolution in both low-level image processing, reasoning, etc, diverse knowledge of the world that an individual obtains during the course of their life which can be blended in various ways to make driving-related decisions, as well as a sense of self-preservation that generally forces them to err on the side of caution. Short of a major AGI breakthrough, safe self-driving on existing road infrastructure is impossible.

> > And he’s admitted self driving was way more difficult than anyone realized,

Sure and the guy is getting paid right now in cold hard cash, while all the synchopants keep ranting about hopes and dreams.

As Jack Nicholson said in 'the Departed' and I quote :

"What we generally do - in this country... is one guy brings the items and the other guy pays him. No tickee, no laundry!"

First the self-driving car for all Americans (the item), then the big payday for Mr.Musk, that's what happened with Mr. Ford back in the day, but what did the guy know? Nowadays you can just bluff your way into riches using the marvelous phenomenon of cult of personality and stock appreciation.

> > It’s now 2013, want to see a video of Starship taking off?

Want to see a sample of what Microsoft's ChatGPT can do?? It's amazing! But that has nothing to do with Microsoft giving Apple a run for its money in the smartphone market like Ballmer predicted back in 2012

There is no correlation between the 2 things just like there is no correlation between rockets and self driving cars, and it's laughable that synchopants think they are correlated just because thought leader and cult of personality enthusiast Elon Musk is both the founder of SpaceX and the petty individual who sued for the right to be called the founder of Tesla

If his dream involves people dying using FSD along the way, it's a nightmare.

"It’s now 2013, want to see a video of Starship taking off?" Can they even build a strong enough launch pad to handle starship?

So it happens, then people realize they can earn money with it, then tesla realizes they can sell it now for 4 times more. In the end, you're not going to earn 4 times more because Tesla or whoever makes the car will take that into account and skim off that top.