No matter how good your offering is, you always need marketing if you are competing against an established behemoth in the space like OpenAI. Even Google has been unable to make much of a dent in OpenAI's daily active users despite having superior distribution and (recently) comparable quality.
Grok 3 is legitimately one of the best general purpose models out there. People don't know about it because ChatGPT is "good enough". And people have no reason to care unless Grok 3 is 5x better or ships a feature that goes viral like Ghibli portraits.
Telegram is ostensibly a competitor if you buy into Musk's pitch for X as an "everything app". Paying Telegram $300M instead of developing chat features and/or marketing proves that plans for the "everything app" are dead in the water, or perhaps were never sincere from the get go.
It's honestly a good fit. Telegram also doesn't have the best image, but people don't care, so it's highly likely that they also don't care about the image of XAI or Musk.
I do struggle with the 1 billion users, but I also don't believe that X has 600 million users actual users.
We'll have to see how privacy is handled (whether you can opt out of it suckling on every one of your personal conversations) but assuming some baseline decency from Telegram, I don't think anyone would be "forced" to use it.
> We’re side stepping the elephant in the room: X/xAI/Musk’s brand is toxic and forcing the product onto users is one of few paths available
This statement is baking in a lot of personal convictions, even if they feel self-evident. Telegram has a billion users and not everyone one of them will share those views. This setup is a lot closer to Google paying Apple and Mozilla to be the default search engine than some desperate attempt to get people to play with your toys.
I know my experience is anecdotal, however, I know at least three people at my workplace who have said in our Slack channel they will never, ever but a Tesla because of Musk's antics while typing it using a Statlink connection.
It sounds like they'll buy an alternative product when one is available. Tesla, X, and xAI all have multiple viable alternatives - superior alternatives even. That's not yet the case for Starlink in many locations[0], but in 5-10 years, your colleague may be using an Amazon Kuiper, One World, Garmin[1], or Apple[1] connection.
0. Symmetric gigabit fiber Internet remains the gold standard, where one can get it, but unfortunately that's not many places.
1. I hope these companies are at least looking into doing these, as it's adjacent to their current products.
Grok3 could be leagues ahead of anything else in the game and yet a large portion of the western population would never use it due to its owners antics.
True, but Musk is an exception. And deliberately so, his media image was one of the things that made Tesla so notable. But we’re seeing recently that it goes both ways.
Musk was the PR, press and Marketing departments rolled into one for Tesla and X, so much so that he fired the PR team at Twitter.
"The public doesn't care who the CEO is" is certifiably not true for Musk ventures, and Musk exploited that brand value in the past positively. The inauguration Seig Heil, and the subsequent DOGE misadventures are the other side of that "personal brand" coin, which very much exists for this CEO.
Don't underestimate how far they've fallen. Tesla is nowhere near the top in Europe anymore. VW sold three times as many EVs as Tesla, with BYD in second place.
This is wrong and I would encourage you to check your sources or look into the industry more before posting a blind yahoo article that was clearly written by AI.
In many of the comparisons, they try to make it more dramatic than it really is by saying volkswagen as an entire brand sold X more than tesla. Well of course they did, they sell hybrids and ICE vehicles too.
> Tesla is nowhere near the top in Europe anymore.
This is factually incorrect. They are #2 overall BEV sales in europe for Q1 2025 and also own #1 and #2 spots for best selling BEV models.
I would expect such a low quality comment from reddit, not HN, but alas here we are in 2025.
And additional reminder for folks that have an axe to grind that perhaps clouds their judgement of reality: when you've dominated the BEV market for almost 10 years, going sideways and down in marketshare is pretty much the only option.
Definitely makes sense that if they are a market leader for an extended period of time they would expect to trade sideways; my question is whether or not Tesla is expected to come out stronger as a growth company in the upcoming quarters (i.e. their recent talks of doing robotaxi work; are investors seeing that as a serious growth angle?) or should Tesla begin investigating an income/dividend stock angle?
Valid. And I do think they'll continue to own the lion's share of total sales for a while. But is there any concern over their being down YOY for Q1 while other manufacturers are largely growing? Or is the expectation that it's a temporary blip and they'll continue growing in the upcoming quarters from previous YOY numbers?
> And I do think they'll continue to own the lion's share of total sales for a while
Maybe in the US where they are protected from Chinese competition. Tesla's fall in Europe has been precipitous, falling by more than 50% YoY. BYD sales overtook Tesla for the first time ever in the last quarter in Western Europe.
Don't bet against Google. Their cloud is growing despite coming from 4th or 5th place, now it's on 3rd place and growing faster than AWS and if I recall correctly, faster than even Azure.
> "Incidentally, have you got a moment to talk about the white genocide in south africa?"
Is this some sort of joke, or are you genuinely wanting to discuss what's happening here in South Africa?
If it's a joke, I think it's in very poor taste at the expense of a persecuted minority. I have seen it, experienced it, and know full well how real it is, no matter how much social-media pushes it one way or the other.
Stages currently active in SA: 1, 2, 3, 4, 6. Some people claim that the high murder rate among white SA'ns means they're also in stage 8/9, but actually the murder rate among black SA'ns is even higher.
There's no genocide, but there's a whole lot of red flags and generally terrible things. Just because Trump believes something does not make it wrong.
From elsewhere on that site: "Dr. Gregory Stanton, Founding President of
Genocide Watch, warned that early warnings of genocide are still deep in South African society, though genocide has not begun."
There are countless examples of early warnings. Here are a couple:
Many similar statements have been made by other politicians, among them Julius Malema, who collectively represent a large part of SA's population, over the course of many years.
Don't respond to something like this with a flippant statement about clutching your pearls.
You need to make your way through 1-5 to get to 6, but I specifically excluded 5 (organization of militias).
There are rumours of this but if it's true, these militias must be very secret indeed.
One problem is that violent criminals run rampant and the state seemingly has little desire to stop them, and zero capacity to do so. Meanwhile prominent politicians sing songs whose lyrics include machine gun sounds and calls for the murder of whites.
Parallel to this, there are job restrictions limiting the maximum number of whites companies may employ or promote. Franchises limit the number of white owners. White business owners are strong-armed through law and government contracts to give up some of their equity. There's regular talk about seizing white-owned property.
Whatever label you want to put on all that, I think the it's fucked up.
The worst part is, the average poor black South African is innocent in all this and now has to live in a place with a spiraling economy, power & water outages, even worse crime than the whites have to face, terrible standards of education, and much more.
>You need to make your way through 1-5 to get to 6
This isn't true. As the genocide watch page says "The process is not linear."
White South Africans are less likely to be victims of crime, make more money, live longer, and are over-represented among corporate and political leadership. Taking steps to undo the damage done by apartheid isn't fucked up, it's necessary as evidenced by the aforementioned inequalities.
And I'm telling you that 1, 2, 3, 4, 6 are the ones that are active right now.
> "Taking steps to undo the damage ... it's necessary"
What a bullshit argument.
How does any of that help "undo" the damage done by apartheid? The government of SA prizes ideology over outcome. The ideology is to attack Western things, even if the outcome is that black South Africans are now very much worse off than they would've been if SA was thriving.
And to cite this as a defence for the abuses and outrages that has literally landed white SA'ns - despite their relative wealth - on a genocide watch.
>And I'm telling you that 1, 2, 3, 4, 6 are the ones that are active right now.
I trust genocide watch more than you to determine which of the genocide watch stages of genocide are underway,
>How does any of that help "undo" the damage done by apartheid?
White South Africans make up 8% of the population but own 72% of farmland. This is a direct result of apartheid and colonial racism more broadly. Expropriating some of this land and returning it to black South Africans is directly undoing this damage.
Thank you. This is all that needs to be said on this subject.
The word genocide does not mean "a lot of red flags and generally terrible things", nor was it made to describe that.
>Don't respond to something like this with a flippant statement about clutching your pearls.
Don't clutch pearls then.
As long as you keep abusing the word "genocide" to apply it to the plight of white people in South Africa, you'll get the response you think is flippant, and I consider to be insufficiently stern given the harm and disrespect of such usage.
Saying this as a Jew whose family members were killed by the Nazis during WW2, by the way.
They were KIA as soldiers, so I'm hesitant to label them as victims of genocide, even though they were certainly the target of it — out of respect both to them, and those who didn't get a chance to die fighting.
You don't get to call a demand for respect flippant.
> Thank you. This is all that needs to be said on this subject.
No? There are tons of completely insane things happening in SA, and much that needs to be said and done. If you're saying the minimum threshold for caring about what happens in other countries is actual genocide, then I disagree with you.
People have been incorrectly calling this a genocide for a long time, which is why the PDF from Genocide Watch dates back to 2015.
On the right you have people trying to make this even worse than it is, and on the left you have people trying to ignore it, or minimize it.
>There are tons of completely insane things happening in SA, and much that needs to be said and done. If you're saying the minimum threshold for caring about what happens in other countries is actual genocide, then I disagree with you.
I'm not saying that.
The subject at hand is whether there's a "white genocide" taking place, and that subject is summed up in a single word: no.
>People have been incorrectly calling this a genocide for a long time
Which is why it's important to not perputate this harmful falsehood any further.
>on the left you have people trying to ignore it, or minimize it.
By using the term genocide where it's not applicable, you're actively minimizing the actual genocides that have taken place (or are taking place) — and by extension, you're complicit in minimizing the very issue you're discussing.
See, we both agree that whatever is taking place in South Africa is not as bad as an actual genocide.
But by using the word "genocide" in conjunction with it, you're diluting the meaning of the word reserved for the absolute extreme — you're helping spread the notion that genocide doesn't have to be that bad; that "red flags and terrible things" fits under the something sort of kind of like genocide label.
What we have in the end is the parable of the boy who cried genocide [1].
The point of the parable isn't that there's no threat of a wolf attack, nor that is shouldn't be seriously considered.
Grok 3 is legitimately one of the best general purpose models out there. People don't know about it because ChatGPT is "good enough". And people have no reason to care unless Grok 3 is 5x better or ships a feature that goes viral like Ghibli portraits.