I remember listening to someone describe a conversation they had with him or where he was speaking, and he relayed that Elon was telling them that in his world he can't relate to people because to him its like everyone is a toddler mentally and he has to go down to their level....now, I just fully don't believe that, that sounds like the most contrived "I'm a genius peasants" story imaginable, something out of a movie.
That's actually pretty common among those "gifted with mild ASD/ADHD" types, they can't be assed to talk about anything that doesn't pique their interest. I struggled with it a lot until I learned to be more social with other folks' topics of discussion. I think Elon is the logical endpoint of what happens when you have zero pressure to socially accommodate.
It does seem like he's increasingly emboldened to act an ass since being crowned world's richest man.
One thing that almost everybody on HN should be able to judge as completely wrong is his claim about "L5 autonomy very close / later this year" [1].
L5 autonomy is the equivalent of the halting problem. L5 is a goal that can't be achieved [2], just like no program can be written that determines if the input program will ever terminate. [3]
So what to make of this, if this apparently smart guy says entry-level stupid things?
[1]: https://electrek.co/2020/07/09/tesla-tsla-elon-musk-level-5-...
[2]: https://macdailynews.com/2019/01/07/waymo-ceo-level-5-fully-...
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem
Edit: Because so many replies here about why I compare it to the Halting problem: That comparison is invalid as many of you pointed out. My reasoning was not in a strict mathematical sense, but more like this: even experienced humans can't drive in every condition. There are situations where you just need to stop. L5 autonomy will only work if we create AGI (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligenc...), so that the system can observe itself and think about itself. An AGI might be possible (in the far future), whereas the Halting problem is mathematically impossible. Thanks for pointing this out.
There is absolutely nothing fundamental that makes L5 autonomy impossible, while the halting problem is provably impossible, as normally formulated.
I don't know how close or far away L5 autonomy is, but it's definitely theoretically reachable, while the halting problem is always going to be impossible.
A car that would complete all the trips I'm willing to complete, and some more, but refuses under some circumstances (e.g. whiteout blizzard conditions) would be a L4 vehicle under the ISO definition.
Can drive in approximately the same set of conditions as a human (professional driver?), possibly being unwilling to drive in certain (seldom encountered) conditions where most humans would, but offset by being willing to drive in conditions few people would.
Importantly, the car must avoid completely giving up on driving mid trip (as opposed to deciding "too dangerous, turn around and go back at next opportunity"), unless conditions are comparable to those in which a human would give up mid trip (which are pretty limited, as humans seldom just stop and give up on the road unless the car is broken down, or fully stuck. At worst, in some really bad conditions, humans may pull other to wait for the storm/extreme-fog/etc to blow over.)
"My BMW still drove during the snows in February, but my neighbor's Tesla said it wouldn't drive 2 of the days." "Yah, but mine doesn't insist that the windows are perfectly clean and pristine before starting a trip!"
We probably should never have had level 5, but split L4 into a couple levels: heavily geofenced/restricted vs. relatively unlimited applicability with some restrictions.
I interperate your comparison to the halting problem to mean that even if we ignore the feasability of a particular solution, it is literally an impossible problem to solve.
My understanding of L5 is driving without external human intervention. In one sense we already have the technology to do that - our brians. It would never be feasible (or ethical), but if we could put a human brain inside every tesla, wouldn't that achieve L5?
* Level 5 is a vehicle that never needs a human to take over and can drive in "all conditions". Humans do not meet this driving standard.
* Level 4 is a vehicle, that within a set of vehicle-defined conditions can drive the vehicle without a human ever having to take over. It refuses to drive unless the conditions are met.
So a level 4 car could be a vehicle that can drive in a 1 block area of residential streets only... or something that can drive in way more conditions than I could safely attempt, but refuses to drive in say, whiteout blizzard conditions at night.
It would achieve L5 of a sort, but people don't usually mean "L5 autonomy" in the sense of "capable of crashing the vehicle deliberately to protest the horror of their existence".
Not saying he's right, but find me a company that doesn't polish their own turds, even just a little bit. Everyone trying to sell something is painting the best picture of their product possible.
Then he claimed we'd have that solved by 2023.
Not sure what the upside is of being known for repeatedly making non-rational predictions and being wrong.
It can significantly move markets in the short term, which he seems to have become adept at doing over the last few years. And unfortunately, the stock market isn't really interested in long-term thinking, it's largely about breaking news and twitter rumors nowadays.
But, the degree of absurdity across predictions undermines even that strategy over time. I think he does himself a disservice here. He should get out of his own way and allow his actual achievements to speak louder than irrational predictions (and other distractions).
Intellectually everyone can deduct that a long distance hyperloop is science fiction, ridiculously expensive, complicated, and will likely face long outages at any incident (see the channel tunnel, but like if it was 10-100x as long and a vacuum). But because Musk says it with Confidence, an army of fans jumps onto it.
Your claim conflates a nebulous, squishy, human goal with a formally and rigorously proven mathematical problem. The only support offered is links to wikipedia and news articles, none of which help connect the two in an equally formal and rigorous fashion.
However, for L5, you just have a quote saying it doesn't work. We know it is mathematically possible for L5 to work because, well, humans perform at that level. We know that our vision, our ears, our hands and senses are enough input to solve the problem.
Do you have a direct connection between them or are you just using it as a metaphor for an unsolvable problem?
Which is not only funny, it's exactly why the halting problem is so hard…
Personally I think full auto-drive requires us to change to the roads to make them work for machines... but that's a different story.
Or is this FSD in the sense of "my car can drive itself home after dropping me off" type of thing?
I am not convinced that L5 is fundamentally impossible (unless we posit that humans are also not L5 autonomous, which I suppose one could argue, as they are prone to driving errors). Granted I subscribe to Universality, and assume that humans are not capable of hyper-computation.
But as far as Musk, yes he lies and isn't shy about it. It's shameless and overt. Perhaps he justifies it as being part of his job.
Recently he said "complexity and cost of a car is greater than that of a humanoid robot".
Musk looked bored with Tim, was often evasive, gave the appearance of wanting to get away from a fanboy.
The few times he would "open up" it was more like a recitation from someone to a disinterested audience — or as though Musk's mind was somewhere else, not really engaged or focused on the interviewer.
EDIT: Skimming the two-part interview again, Musk seems to switch between seemingly being engaged to not. Maybe it is because the interview went on really long and appears to be uncut.
I think it's telling that he didn't tell Tim to scram or he even got that close of a look at all. If he wanted to get away, he could have easily done so.
The disparity is even more obvious in the pressers when reporters ask typical reporter questions, vs when someone (often Tim, but there are others) asks something technical.
Can you even imagine being Musk and running an EV company and a rocket company and having to field questions from your typical journalists? Like that Q from a journalist about why the new image of the black home at the center of our galaxy is so blurry: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31353677.
Later on when he was giving that update at Starbase he mentioned the heat shield and thanked someone for a "robust" shield. I couldn't quite tell if he was being sarcastic or not.
Having said that, Musk is pretty much the worst communicator i've ever heard at the C suite level. I hope/pray he's better when talking to direct reports trying to get his crazy ass ideas and timelines done. Those poor poor people if he's not...
Despite people in tech conflating ASD/ADHD and using them as some kind of weird bragging right (and excuse for not considering others), I don't know that there is any public information about his having either condition.
> He seems to open up more when talking to people he considers "on his level" or at least deeply interested in what he is interested in.
That's just called childish behavior, and despite it's name it is common in a lot of adults, not just Musk.
But most adults who act that way can't get away with it. When it is paired with wealth and a megaphone as it is with Musk and others like him, not only can they get away with it, but it can be amplified by a mass following of people who wish they could get away with it, and live vicariously through them. That is basically how cults work.
> That's just called childish behavior,
That's pretty judgy, IMHO.
> But most adults who act that way can't get away with it. When it is paired with wealth and a megaphone as it is with Musk and others like him, not only can they get away with it, but it can be amplified by a mass following of people who wish they could get away with it, and live vicariously through them.
True.
I punch up. Even if he has Aspergers, with his amount of wealth and power he doesn't get to escape my judgement.
He’s posting his cold brew pics to Twitter. Caffeine is a psychoactive substance that can foster manic behavior. Lack of sleep can create cognitive stability issues. Been there with both.
Who knows if he’s taken other things here and there as Mr Private Plane bounces around socializing.
Despite Twitter, how much of Elon’s life we don’t see is significant.
It's a shame that these are so often the takeaways from a show that is at its core about a group of people with different skillsets and backgrounds working together with mutual trust and respect to further a common goal.
As a comparison, back the day I t liked Babylon 5 better. Tried watching it again and just couldn't the way I can always rewatch ST TNG, DS9 or even Voyager.
On the other hand there is the fact that Starfleet is the de-facto military junta, a morally fine one of course. Or moral high horse crap like the prime directive. The overall optimism is good so, and especially DS9 did a good job in showing the ambivalency that comes from ideals meeting real politics. E.g. the arc between Sisko and the Maquis, having Sisko side with, of all people, war criminal Dukat.
I guess you could kind of apply it to Musk in that he seems to revel in being something of a jerk, but (in the view of someone who's been very skeptical of Musk for a while) it's not an all-consuming thing.
1. They still need to follow the basic rules of society, i.e. people haven't started "God-Emperor Elon" memes yet, so not every single person is going to bow down.
2. Before they've achieved amazing success, they aren't 100% confident in their other-wordly abilities. Now, given his success with PayPal, Tesla, and Space-X, it's easy for him to believe his own press.
Thus, Elon is now at the point where all of his negative traits are essentially allowed to "run wild" because they are constrained neither by society at large, nor his own doubts.
See for instance https://youtu.be/ye8zcgxWMDc where he only stays as it's a major presse event (the guy buy his side was running for chancellor to succeed Merkel; and yeah the questions were "dumb" but with your questions you won't get a better response)
Agreed. Musk has gone full Assange.
Baring literal children isn't legal!
You can use thermo to build civilization, but you can't use a cello to do that!
> I don't see how anything but hubris can make someone see differently.
We don't know the context of this conversation with Musk. In "just between us engineers" conversations, there's plenty of hubris to go around. It's not just engineers, of course. Many of the highly educated professionals I know will express demeaning opinions about religious people or rural folks after a few drinks.
To be clear, I don't think being condescending is a virtue. But I don't see any reason to single Musk out for that specifically. I don't see him talking shit about how stupid everyone is, like many people do.
Depends on how you define “civilization”!
That would Provo be because the attached attic sis related to belong musk not “everybody” and “many people”.
Somebody like Anish Giri might be a very good sport and play a (very short) game of chess with me, but I doubt he would expect to learn anything from it. Of course, he probably wouldn't waste his time on me. Either way, he would still be a great asset to help somebody like Ian Nepomniachtchi prepare for a tournament.
Of course, being considerate and welcoming to everybody all the time is super awesome. Those who manage it have my respect whether they are perceived as the best in their field or not.
This is how the 10% end up with 5 jobs in 8 years, watching those who they thought were beneath them rise up and take leadership positions because they're too much of a pain in the ass to work with.
What's happening is, you have a person (Elon) of exceptional intelligence, so they can recognize a thing or concept and instantly follow it out to rational conclusions faster than the people around them, but they have not developed their intuitive side and don't respect the empty part, the unknown part, of the problem space.
It's like that halting problem thing: they become so accustomed to being able to see 'the answer' that they get blind to the mystery, the ambiguity of the non-answers and the areas where a real innovation will come from. They're not surprised by anything, or surprisable, so they become a specific kind of intelligent, very very quick and correct.
If you're a designer/inventor/artist type person you rely much more heavily on the non-answer spaces because those are where you work. That's not Elon. He has people for that, and takes the credit for their work, and impresses them so much with his ability to be quick that they go right along with it. In real terms they could not get their stuff done without him as that ringleader, figurehead, the 'Mr. Outside' there to impress the masses and get them to give him their money. It's a symbiotic relationship and Elon has done that over and over.
Don't look to Elon personally to have the revolutionary idea. However, if you show him one, he may well see where it leads way quicker than you do… and take it, and make a business out of it, and then hire you and have you doing it whilst taking a big cut of what you earn from it.
In this way Elon 'gets' capitalism as well and quickly as he gets everything else. He's definitely the man for late stage capitalism.
Lets get one thing straight. If you are on the spectrum, the reason you act like this is because you don't understand that you are doing something wrong. Its a spectrum, normally around social interaction, and not understanding, or being able to pick up on the slow of social information.
However for most high functioning people it is possible, with work, to mitigate those "negative" qualities.
It is not an excuse to be a dick. What Elon is doing is a choice. He is perfectly capable of interacting with people enough to have a series of relationships with people without making them feel like shit. I would therefore postulate that whilst he might be on the spectrum, he has worked hard to mitigate it.
What Elon is, is a rich school boy.
This might be a nitpick, I wouldn't describe it as an "understanding" problem. Usually we understand that there are social cues and what they mean (at least in the mild cases). The difference is in the strength of that signal.
It's like as if people have a warning indicator when doing things socially inept. Most folks seem to have a loud klaxon "You are being an ass! Stop that!". With ASD, it's more like a quiet "check engine" light that's easy to overlook.
If you never experience the social pressure to actively look for that indicator light (see exhibit E.), you never really build strong social graces. Or, maybe you just don't give a damn about masking, too tired, just not interested.
I strongly feel this is the case with not only Musk, but a lot of high ranking "leaders"; I believe that you need an amount of ruthlessness, of indifference, an ability to turn off your morals to be in that position and get even richer. I mean just look at how he fucks his staff over and expects them to work ridiculous hours, bragging about how much he works (the difference being he gets paid for every second he is alive, while staff only gets paid for contract hours).
Yes, it is more complex than simply "mind over matter", but it's still an important development milestone.
completely untrue, nearly all autistic people I know including me are hyper-aware of social situations and specifically act in ways to avoid being a dick. this is a pop-psychology notion of autism.
Now, I don't think Musk never faced consequences when he was young, and never learned this stuff, but I do think he faces absolutely no consequences today, and is happy to not put in any effort.
Somebody on the outside might see a big difference in result, say a 50% approval rating vs a 35% approval rating. But from the inside it can all look the same: "everybody hates me anyway" or "most people love me anyway".
my late step-father would say this person needs an "ass-whoopin"
No, it's actually because you don't think it's wrong in the first place.
I understand why people prefer to lie to protect other's emotions, or why people prefer being high-status rather than being right, but I disagree with that, I think it's wrong.
Sometimes, you know it’s wrong, at least at some level, but are so fucking tired of masking all the time you just do it anyway.
I feel like "masking" is being used for "be polite". I didn't decide to be rude, I decided not to mask my disability.
That is bullshit.
People on the spectrum may have a harder time understanding what is rude, and that may give some passes when you don't realize it. But if you decide to ignore what you've learned is rude, you're just an ass.
And "going to bathroom and not pissing on the floor" is physical labor. Even more so if you are on crutches.
I completely disagree with your artificial distinction between "being respectful to others" and "politeness". Politeness is defined as being respectful to others
We all benefit from a more polite interaction. To refuse to be polite because it requires effort is just taking advantage of the system without paying it back.
You can also be rich and relatively unknown, most rich people are. He chooses to be super public.
Does it? I know literally nothing about the personality of the Wright brothers. Or Henry Ford. Or Thomas Edison. Their legacy is their inventions. Hype and media coverage are temporary at best. And unfortunately, Musk's hype and media presence tends to show him at his worst. I'm not sure whether Musk fans realize how many non-fans actually despise the guy. If anything, he's wrecking his legacy. Shut up and build stuff.
Meanwhile, there's great engineers working at both Tesla and SpaceX, but the only person you know is Elon.
Ford was pretty similar from my reading.
Both men had early career success and worked harder than most at achieving their goals. But their ongoing successes were very much political and public perception. Ford especially was incredibly politically active and noisy about it.
I imagine Elon's legacy (should he be remembered) will not be his twitter shitposting, but electric cars and rocketry.
Nobody remembers Ford's political activism. Apparently he ran for US Senate once and lost. Is there any reason to think that Ford's political activism had anything to do with the success of the Ford Motor Company?
Ford hyping cars is fine and expected. Ford hyping politics doesn't really seem to add anything. In fact, it appears that there were some antisemitic writings associated with Ford, there was a lawsuit and a consumer boycott, and he was forced to apologize.
A common fallacy is to assume that everything a successful person does in life contributes to their success. OJ Simpson was one of the greatest football running backs ever, and he was also a murderer. You might say, "if he wasn't a violent person, then he wouldn't have been a great running back", but somehow Barry Sanders managed not to murder anyone.
They represented the last effort after standing on the shoulders of giants, basically being the person who got to sign off the quality of life improvement and reap the financial reward. It happens, could have been somebody else but in the end it was them.
mr.Musk has been at the helm of Tesla for 20 years and his product is nor widespread (only 1% of total number of global vehicles sold in FY21) nor revolutionary from a quality of life standpoint (at the end of the day it's a car and you can hardly tell the difference between Tesla EVs and MercedesEQS, iBMW, Toyota EVs etc....if anything the Quality Of life gap is towards the other automakers)
The paradigm shift that gets to 95% marketshare before getting copied? Nowhere to be seen.
Tesla changed the way people feel about Tesla.
When people say they are not a car company they are right. They are a cult company. They sell cult. Of the techno-utopian kind.
Importantly, some of those people were in positions of influence at other auto manufacturers. So Tesla didn't have to capture 95% marketshare to change the industry.
I think that the blinding glamour of a Tesla has faded quite a bit. I think, 20 years on, we expect to see strong competition to them. The lane assist, the adaptive cruise control, the touch screen console... these are a bit boring now. Others have had them for a long time. Some probably had them before Tesla. Hopefully, several competitors will start offering 500 km range EVs. Tesla can still cult that advantage.
But the cult of Tesla scared established players. Everyone has scrambled to adapt since. And the public has been persuaded to keep the pressure on. Tesla represents an historic shift. I don't have to like them or buy them. But I recognize their place in history.
I'll go a step further and I can hardly tell the difference between a Tesla and a used ICE car.
But the hell with it...I can always delete it.
I think people are taking crazy pills, they religiously follow this guy and his delusions about becoming a multiplanetary specie before the Sun becomes a red giant....5 billions years from now.
As they have such thoughts they have to walk through human feces and scenes from the Walking Dead...only with the homeless instead of zombies.
Stuff that would scare them to death if they saw it in a movie or compel them to pity if they happened in the background of a live news reportage from Ukraine.
Instead it's happening under their nose as they wonder if Mars is ambitious enough or we should aim directly for the Andromeda Galaxy.
If he wants to make Starship a reality, he needs permits and government contracts.
I met an African-American man about ten years ago who owned an excellent patent portfolio covering technology like this
https://patents.google.com/patent/US6695260
but he was the only black person I've ever met who hated Barack Obama. He was an extreme Republican, thought Democrats all worked for the anti-Christ, etc.
I figured there was no way he'd succeed at what he was trying to do because he'd need to make nice with the government no matter who the administration was. I haven't heard from him again.
I see Musk going down the same road. I can only imagine the last man is dying on Earth 1000 years from now and cursing: "If only Elon Musk didn't have to post that tweet we would have made it to Mars."
No science says “yes rockets and spreading through the stars is definitely the future for humans.”
The odds he’s just exacerbating damaging industrial feedback loops and a worse mess for the future are much higher than successful Mars colonies and extrasolar expansion coming from his efforts
Elon really needs to focus on the energy and transportation thing that he really is good at.
* which ethical AI would that be?
* how many people has elon sent to mars now?
elon has marketed an image to people, one of a tony stark-like figure, that might do or say the wrong thing at the time, but who truly wants to make everything better.
the reality is that, whilst perhaps not a conman (although i find my opinion of him leaning to that end more each day), he’s definitely just another profit-driven business man, with little to no regard of the people around him. and probably a sociopath.
bill gates has done (a lot) more for humanity. and i’m not particularly fond of him, either.
There’s absolutely no guarantee he’s on the right track. Humans expanding away from Earth is as likely as us being able to rewrite the speed of light.
There’s no rewriting the fundamentals of reality. One really bad day and Mars colony is wiped out. How much damage we do here before getting there is a real concern.
Please, go on. I want to hear more about how thermodynamics can be waved away for “just an engineering project.”
This is what I mean. Obsession and success with engineering has titillated people to the point of blind faith. Externalities do not exist in their conceptual void. It’s become akin to unfalsifiable religious belief.
If humanity doesn't spend the resources on spreading humanity throughout the universe, then the resources will be spent on disposable plastic toys that fill landfills. It's not as if an edenic utopia is being despoiled for this boondoggle. Our environment isn't in its precarious state because of too much space travel. We're debating over the disposition of a tiny fraction of our dwindling material resources, negligible in the grand scheme.
> I want to hear more about how thermodynamics can be waved away for “just an engineering project.”
If we have a limited period before climate doomsday, then we'd better get cracking on space travel before it's too late.
Plus, it's often used as an excuse or a mark of honor; an excuse for unacceptable behaviour, and a mark of honor for being super smart and not like those Other Autists who struggle in their day to day.
The word has been besmirched by its namesake and the behaviour of those using it to distinguish themselves from "other" people with autism.
(My impression of his politics is more that they’re anarchic then left/right, but I’m not excited enough by his words to listen beyond the presentations and random support for e.g. UBI).
And possibly abduct or murder congresspeople (thinking of the guy with clearly visible tie wrap restraints, or the republican that was telling where to find democrat members of congress)
Let’s not act like our air gapped view of him through screens can provide an accurate diagnosis of real medical conditions
Tesla revenue for the quarter ending March 31, 2022 was $18.756B, a 80.54% increase year-over-year.
Tesla revenue for the twelve months ending March 31, 2022 was $59.810B, a 74.73% increase year-over-year.
Tesla annual revenue for 2021 was $53.823B, a 70.67% increase from 2020.
Tesla annual revenue for 2020 was $31.536B, a 28.31% increase from 2019.
Tesla annual revenue for 2019 was $24.578B, a 14.52% increase from 2018.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/TSLA/tesla/revenue
He called Vernon Unsworth a "pedo guy" in a tweet after he rescued all of those kids in Thailand and criticized Musk's plan to build a small submarine to get them out. That wasn't a joke, it wasn't meant to elicit a humorous response, it was clearly meant to defame someone. Notice that accusing folks of pedophilia has become a pretty common tactic for the right nowadays.
Calling someone a pedo seems pretty unhinged for a billionaire responsible for running major companies, it honestly surprised me how Musk would spend his public energy saying that kind of stuff, and especially when you consider the power dynamics involved, it's hard to interpret his actions as anything other than driven by insecurity. But I guess beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
https://www.businessinsider.co.za/elon-musk-pedo-guy-really-...
It doesn't really matter if this was intentional malice or reckless negligence. It was wildly, wildly unacceptable either way.
No, I'm a mature adult. Sure, I'll disagree with someone. Hell, I'll even say things like, "that was a bigoted statement", but I will never make up an insult to avenge an attack. I work every day to prevent that behaviour in my kids. I'm not going to replicate it in my life.
It's also not up to you to decide when someone "needs to get over it."
I read this as a polite way of saying he's up his own arse, which seems accurate.
I never liked him before and probably won't in the future. I doubt I'd like anybody who's literally dragging humanity into the future, but he is doing that.
Whether he's doing it right, or whether he's doing it well is an open question, but no other single person is to this degree shoving humanity forward this often and this much, as far as I know.
He went from being wealthy growing up, to being very rich after Paypal, to being an extremely rich billionaire, to being the most richest person in the world (maybe ever?). And now a single utterance of his can shape markets or otherwise influence millions of people.
I think it would be difficult to go through the above and not come out the other end without it impacting your behaviors & world view. At a minimum, before he was this wealthy & influential he didn't have as much margin for error. A single bad decision might have tanked Tesla or SpaceX when they were getting started. It would have required Musk to be a lot more careful & deliberate. He also had to care a bit more (or at least pretend to care) about other people's thoughts/ideas etc. These days he can lose $1B in a twitter acquisition breakup fee and it barely matters. And he has enough "f*ck off" money (the amount required to tell someone to "f*ck off" with no significant consequences) to tell anyone to f*ck off. The need to adhere to social niceties is greatly reduced.
This is all on top of the fact that the average person's behavior is usually going to change at least a little as they get older.
All of which is to say that I think there's an excellent chance that he's grown into his current personality. If so, I think it's very possible that it's a mixture: He grew into where he is now, but the seeds were always there & his track in life has amplified or caused those seeds to take hold.
"He’s obviously a visionary. I prefer dealing with him to others because he gives you genuine answers. He will call you back. He will have a beef with you when others run away because they’re cowardly. If he disagrees, he’ll be in your face, but at least he’s in your face. I’m perfectly fine with that. In a world where everybody’s making a lot of silly stuff, he’s not. Cars, rockets, solar, these are important things. He can’t be as silly or as fascist as people make him out to be. Maybe he does act like a stupid tech bro sometimes, but maybe he’s a little more complex than that? Thomas Edison was not a nice man. Many inventors were very difficult, problematic people — Steve Jobs, for example. The times we live in are so reductive that it’s really hard to be able to get our minds around a truly complex human being. And that’s what he is."
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/04/kara-swisher-on-elon...
Kevin Watson's take, who developed the avionics for Falcon 9 and Dragon and previously managed the Advanced Computer Systems and Technologies Group within the Autonomous Systems Division at NASA's Jet Propulsion laboratory:
"Elon is brilliant. He’s involved in just about everything. He understands everything. If he asks you a question, you learn very quickly not to go give him a gut reaction.
He wants answers that get down to the fundamental laws of physics. One thing he understands really well is the physics of the rockets. He understands that like nobody else. The stuff I have seen him do in his head is crazy.
He can get in discussions about flying a satellite and whether we can make the right orbit and deliver Dragon at the same time and solve all these equations in real time. It’s amazing to watch the amount of knowledge he has accumulated over the years."
Garrett Reisman, engineer and former NASA astronaut:
"What's really remarkable to me is the breadth of his knowledge. I mean I've met a lot of super super smart people but they're usually super super smart on one thing and he's able to have conversations with our top engineers about the software, and the most arcane aspects of that and then he'll turn to our manufacturing engineers and have discussions about some really esoteric welding process for some crazy alloy and he'll just go back and forth and his ability to do that across the different technologies that go into rockets cars and everything else he does."
Musk's not much of an inventor, though. Certainly, that's not why he's rich.
Part of the criticism of Musk is that the popular view of him is totally out of whack with what you get if you just look at what he does, and has done. He's not Tony Stark.
I think Elon falls much more into the second category, which I agree is not really like Tony Stark, but I think still provides a ton of value to society. I think there's a real argument to be made that he is the reason we have dropped cost per pound of payload to orbit by over half with reusable rockets, even if he himself didn't invent the functionality.
But he's not a super-genius, and given how flighty he can be, when he announces various Grand Visions, it's wise to take a wait-and-see approach. His big mouth probably ought to have landed him in quite a bit of legal trouble, too, except that it's so much harder for the justice system to deal with rich people than poor people.
It's not that he's uniquely awful among successful business dudes, since much of the above is true about many of them—his PR and superfans are just... grating.
That said if you're a patron of inventors then you are an inventor. If you can manage the pain of failing and failing and failing, then in my book you're creative and a co-inventor.
That still makes him a pretty big deal, of course.
It is also probably worth nothing that they all had another trait in common. They were all notorious assholes for various reasons.
So fuck your tunnels, fuck your cars, fuck your rockets, fuck your cars again
You promised you'd be Tesla, but you're just another Edison
I agree, and think of him in much the same was as I think of Edison. It's strange how polarizing a figure Musk is. It seems like a majority of people (or maybe a vocal minority) either want to attribute every single thing to his own personal genius, no help from others or good fortune. While others view everything he's accomplished as nothing more than luck born out on the backs of other people's labor. I don't know where the balance lies between those two extremes but I doubt that either one is very accurate.
My conclusion instead is that Elon Musk is Chaos Titan; like the netflix chaos monkey, but basically just going around causing chaos by hyping up twitter and then causing massive swings with individual tweets.
I don't mind Musk much either way and while I'm annoyed when he wants to let Trump back on Twitter after what I strongly believe was an attempt at a coup d'état, or him removing, say, the mobile charger in new Teslas I still like the products that his companies make and when he sits down and does an interview he says things that resonate with me.
So what makes someone a visionary? I mean I sit down and have a vision where Earth is a multi-planetary species, we build an outpost on the Moon within the next few years, and then Mars, and then mine asteroids. But is that all it takes? If so I think the word visionary is often either misapplied or is quite diluted. But if we take into account the need to execute on such visions, naturally, calling Musk a visionary makes more sense. Maybe we just don't have a great word (or one isn't immediately coming to mind) for someone who says "we should go to Mars, and I'm going to participate/lead in the creation of the entity that will do that".
Then comes SpaceX, doing engineering that NASA seems either incapable of or uninterested in (no specific blame on NASA, there is no substantial government push for progress in this area). OK, maybe you and I have not directly benefited from SpaceX yet, but do not discount the accruing benefit of cheap transport to space.
There are much, much, much easier ways to make money than to make an electric car company and a space company. Your argument is a little too cynical.
I literally drive a Tesla. I've watched SpaceX land reusable rockets and send people to the International Space Station. What you are saying here is factually incorrect and I'm really losing patience for this very obvious trolling and flame-baiting.
Congrats for being rich I guess? Your car brand is still as rare as Porsches, if you account for Europe it's still more rare on the road compared to Porsches.
Musk has been at the helm of Tesla since 2002. In FY21 Tesla accounted for 1% of vehicles sold globally. 1% in 20 years
I reapeat. 1% in 20 years. Hyper-growth for me (the stock market) , snail growth for thee (the American/global consumer)
[1]https://carsalesbase.com/us-car-sales-analysis-2021/ [2]https://www.goodcarbadcar.net/porsche-us-sales-figures/
It's absolutely not that rare.
As a side note, I would suggest reviewing HN's community guidelines regarding discussion of controversial issues and use of throwaway accounts. Respecting these guidelines would help your comments remain visible, rather than getting downvoted grey.[0]
> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
> Throwaway accounts are ok for sensitive information, but *please don't create accounts routinely. HN is a community—users should have an identity that others can relate to.*
WRT the last point, maybe you just found HN this week and this is your brand-new community identity, but your account name and posting activity doesn't give that impression.
He's already delivered, one hundred times over. Continuously moving the goal posts of what you're criticizing doesn't suddenly make it a lack of delivery.
So, I tried to walk the line without using judgmental language. My own opinion is that he's a complicated figure. I can't come to a firm judgement on him because I don't know how much of what we see is truly him, how much of it is an act, and if it's truly him whether or not it's a representative small slice of him or not. I have a firm judgement on his his public persona, which I think makes him look like an asshole (the pedo guy stuff alone clinches that) but even if that's an accurate picture of him as a whole I still admire what he has accomplished.
Someone is sexist against 50% of the people the interact with? They are sexist.
Someone is sexist against 20% of the people the interact with? Still sexist.
That someone is sexist against 5% of the people the interact with? Still sexist.
The person does not stop being sexist/shitty/$negative_trait just because they most of the time are not acting on it. They become nice when they stop altogether, or at least make clear effort to stop.
So, back to Elon, considering his recent praise of work/life balance and slave-like conditions in China, I see no reason to believe his nice side should be considered equally or more worthy of praise than his negative side be considered for criticism.
Putting Musk aside, I'd have to know a little more about what you mean by $negative_trait to agree or not. Everyone has negative traits, everyone is occasionally shitty. Frequency certainly matters, but assuming it's not very regular than maybe it comes down to what you said about "clear effort to stop". You have to be self aware enough to recognize it when it happens and work on doing better.
I mean look at all the other “big names” in tech… Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs. These are highly flawed individuals.
Hell look at the entertainment industry… so many of the most famous successful people turn out to be hugely flawed. Take Jonny Depp for example—that dude has some major issues. Or to a much greater extent Bill Cosby. Cosby transformed TV in so many different incredibly positive ways and look how it ended…
Fame and wealth does some weird stuff to people.
This is the crucial point. Power corrupts, a painful fact long established. Therefore, when the power and wealth of an individual grows, they deserve more scrutiny and criticism. You don't "give them a break because they're human". The self-preservation of society and freedom itself demands that we closely scrutinize the powerful. If you don't want to be scrutinized like that, then it's easy to avoid becoming a leader. It's a cliche, but with great power comes great responsibility, and Musk is still acting like a child half the time, egged on by a legion of equally childish fans.
I say all we can judge someone is what they do. It's perfectly fine to judge Musk on his public persona. Unless you want to try to divine secret reasons for his public actions, but even that is judging him based on his public persona.
I'm not saying you need to naively believe what he says are his motivations. But his public persona is at least somewhat predictable.
> if he was always like that or grew into it at one point.
Most elite celebrities, politicians, and businesspeople simply put a lot of effort into pretending to be perfect, mostly out of vanity. They lie, hide, avoid all controversy, and employ teams of PR people to craft their public image using publicity stunts, bribery, philanthropy and all kinds of tricks that have been proven to work for thousands of years.
If Elon Musk followed the elite PR playbook, a lot more people would like him, probably a lot of the haters in this thread. Which says more about them than him.
Elon Musk offers a glimpse of what very powerful/successful, and basically good, people are often really like.
I'd argue that:
1. Anyone who completely denigrates and dismisses Elon Musk is a blind hater.
2. Anyone who claims he's without flaws is a fanboy with rose colored glasses on.
3. And only people who agree with his own assessment of himself, that he's a "mixed bag", are assessing him clearly and with intellectual honesty.
Do they have a responsibility to set a positive example? Absolutely. Is that always achievable? Turns out probably not.
I think society needs to learn to forgive. We got really good at canceling people, but we haven’t got very good at forgiveness. In the internet age where your entire life can be saved on the internet, it is important to realize people change, everybody makes mistakes (sometimes even very stupid ones) and people aren’t perfect.
I don’t know… I guess they say you should never meet your heroes. I think now that we can peek behind the curtain and often see the “actual person” we have to come to terms with the fact that under all the fancy dress and act, even the “highest” in society are ultimately the same flawed, imperfect humans as the rest of us.
None of us really know what the fuck we are doing… we are all making it up as we go along. Even the most successful amongst us.
The “pedo guy” accusation was beyond the pale and, so far as I remember, Musk doubled down on it vs making any sincere attempt at an apology.
And yeah… the pedo guy thing was completely uncalled for.
I think it's similar to how he has banned use of Kanban or other Toyota Production System principles at Tesla (which is the easy explanation for their poor build quality, see: U.S. car manufacturing 1970's).
Musk may still fall short in those ways, which is why I made the "ever" a question. Poking around the internet a bit more-- your link & others-- it seems pretty likely. Then again I'm not sure there can really be a meaningful difference in wealth between anyone who was worth the equivalent of > $100B in todays money, however it's calculated. (Possibly you'd distinguish between money on paper vs. more tangible assets. Or some method of distinguishing Musk's wealth, a lot of which seems based on the speculative future value of Tesla than based in its current operations)
If you were buying a house, and had already made an offer and put down 3% earnest money with your offer, but then realized you could probably get 30% off the purchase price by backing out and offering again - would you?
Elon disputes some accounts of his family's wealth, but also doesn't offer much else on the topic except that he arrived in Canada with little money and ended with student debt. This is not incompatible with growing up in a wealthy family. People peace-out from their family for all sorts of reasons, and Elon himself gives a great one when he said he didn't want to be a part of apartheid, and that his father was a terrible person. I know someone who did that because of a similar father issue: very wealthy family, and the person wanted no part of his father's help once he was old enough to leave home.
By the father's own account they owned a plane worth about $300,000 in today's money. That alone-- enough to have a luxury good of that value-- is enough to put someone down as wealthy to me.
He wasn't especially wealthy growing up, to be clear. Upper class yes, but no more "wealthy" than a successful silicon valley engineer's child.
This most definitely is false. Elon grew up middle class at best.
On top of that, his father has claimes he sold the plane for the equivalent of about $300,000 in today's money and used some of it to purchase shares in gemstone mine, which then went on to make them even wealthier. This isn't independently confirmed. His father may have exaggerated. However others have said his family also own the largest house in the area, which sounds wealthy to me.
Elon has disputed some of this, but not offered details beyond merely disputing some of this. He said his parents have been supported financially for the last 20 years, but going back 20 years from when he made that statement would put it in the late 90's, so it is not incompatible with growing up wealthy even though he now supports his parents. Plenty of multi-millionaires would tell their parents, "Hey, if you don't want to you don't have to work anymore. I got this".
Also none of this is incompatible with Elon's own account of arriving in Canada with little money & ending up with student debt. It's possible Elon exaggerated but for these purposes I'll take him at his word. Because by his own account Elon didn't like Apartheid. His father also has a reputation of being quite an asshole. It would be perfectly understandable for him to "peace out" and go his own way, and it wouldn't change the fact that growing up his family was wealthy. In fact I know someone who did pretty much the same thing: Their father was terrorized the family in fear & abuse, but was extremely successful with a very expensive first house, another vacation home, etc. His father wanted him to continue in his (professional) footsteps but he wanted none of it, joined the military for the free education and after getting out went on to become extremely wealthy himself.
Either way, scrounging by to purchase a $300,000 luxury good (today's $ for the sell price of the plane) still qualifies a person as wealthy in my book, especially when taken together with owning the largest home in their area & his father's real estate & consulting business. It still means you had at least $300,000 in disposable income. Just because you choose to spend all of your disposable income on something like that doesn't mean you aren't wealthy.
From wikipedia:
"The family was very wealthy in Elon's youth; Errol Musk once said, 'We had so much money at times we couldn't even close our safe.'"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk#Childhood_and_family
We have a pretty good idea what Errol's net worth is, and it's a couple million bucks.
The emerald mine in question was purchased for the equivalent of $40,000.
I should note that my working definition of "wealthy" doesn't mean they never have to work again, or don't have to work to maintain their desired lifestyle. Other people may have different benchmarks. As you said, abstract measures aren't easily quantified, and someone else's benchmark for wealthy may be higher.
This describes many boomers that simply own a house.
It most assuredly does not.
https://www.businessinsider.com/typical-baby-boomer-net-wort...
That's not mathematically logical. 'Average' can be used to describe mean, median or mode.
So median is the relevant interpretation of average in that context. Your correction and interpretation are valid.
Someone makes an implication that they were fabulously wealthy, using abstract measures like emerald mines, or small planes as a substitute for a concrete measure of wealth.
Someone points out the value of both those things was actually quite low.
Then the goal posts shift to how much more money the Musk family had than the average family, which is true enough.
But they were still decidedly middle class. They all had to work for a living. And in American terms, there are tens of millions of households with similar wealth. Upper middle class, to be sure, but nothing unusual.
And the emerald mine, such as it was, is said to have been in Zambia, not South Africa.
There's hardly a move of goalpost here. People merely argue that showing Elon as self-made "in parent's garage" is bullshit. He had family with capabilities to enable him to participate in ecoms bubble.
> Zambia, not South Africa
"You are wrong, that labour camp wasn't in USSR but in North Korea." I've haven't named the country BTW.
In the US, there are 13.6 million households with a net worth over $1 million when excluding their primary residence, out of a total of 126 million households.
Over 10% of households in the US, even when excluding the value of their home, have over a million dollars in assets.
There is a good reason why the family left SA the moment apartheid was abolished and why Elon Musk never went back since the end of apartheid.
Every entitled chuckle-duck born with a silver spoon in their mouth likes to launder their past to make them look self-made. Elon is no different.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treasure_Islands:_Tax_Havens_a...
People WANT to believe a mythology that Elon started off rich to feel better about not accomplishing anything with their own equally or more privileged life. People that started with little themselves don't have this level of cognitive dissonance and see it more as an immigrant success story and inspiration.
The biggest privilege is having your family's security net, even if you don't use it. Musk has also had luck, being in the right time and place for the dot-com boom. Unlike a lot of people who grew up privileged, he's been a hustler with great business instincts. Unlike a lot of hustlers with great business instincts, he grew up privileged.
Could the average American in 1995 give a $28,000 loan to his kid? Median net worth was ~$100,000 in today’s dollars. If ‘privilege’ has negative connotations for you, use ‘luck’ instead. I don’t think there’s any question that Musk made some of his own luck through hard work and intelligence, but we often observe the rich with survivorship bias because it would upset the social order if we stopped believing that hard work and intelligence are enough to become rich.
What does this sentence mean, why’d he need a second computer? Parsing out the odd wording that means he could afford a computer
What’s with the second computer? It’s proper nerd sniped me this haha
He left South Africa at 17 with no money to speak of. He's estranged from his father for reasons no one talks about, which makes the father's possible wealth irrelevant.
And yet this "apartheid emerald mine fortune" is such a good story that it will keep being "internet true" forever.
https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/wikipedias-jewish-problem-pe...
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/former-wikipedia-edi...
https://www.amazon.com/Elon-Musk-SpaceX-Fantastic-Future/dp/...
https://savingjournalism.substack.com/p/i-talked-to-elon-mus...
This is a laughable statement. That's assuming the newspapers acting as sources are devoid of bias, while we clearly know that they are partisan in the own right: even stuff that the NYT is heavily biased and can't be seriously used as a reference for everything.
Crowd-sourcing is not a robust mechanism to prevent that from happening either. Just look at every controversial topic on Wikipedia, there is only one narrative that is accepted while the reality might be way more complex that what is portrayed in a paragraph.
For any popular topic, there are self-appointed watchdogs who will revert edits in bad faith and argue with you on the Talk page until you give up and go away. There aren't enough admins to adjudicate all disputes, so what you're reading on a controversial topic is often the product of the most stubborn arguers.
That's how the sausage is made on WP.
Attacking the very idea that it's even possible to know the truth is what you do when the truth isn't on your side.
I'm sure many HN regulars have homes costing much more than a safe full of $13 notes.
I wouldn't be too confident that "We had so much money at times we couldn't even close our safe." is an amount of money that would actually make someone particularly wealthy by American standards without doing a fair bit of research on what currency that safe would have been full of and how much it had been worth at the time.
> Interviews with relatives and former classmates reveal an upbringing in elite, segregated white communities that were littered with anti-Black government propaganda, and detached from the atrocities that white political leaders inflicted on the Black majority.
> Mr. Musk, 50, grew up in the economic hub of Johannesburg, the executive capital of Pretoria and the coastal city of Durban. His suburban communities were largely shrouded in misinformation. Newspapers sometimes arrived on doorsteps with whole sections blacked out, and nightly news bulletins ended with the national anthem and an image of the national flag flapping as the names of white young men who were killed fighting for the government scrolled on the screen.
> “We were really clueless as white South African teenagers. Really clueless,” said Melanie Cheary, a classmate of Mr. Musk’s during the two years he spent at Bryanston High School in the northern suburbs of Johannesburg, where Black people were rarely seen other than in service of white families living in palatial homes.
They go onto say that Musk had black friends and left SA to avoid serving the apartheid government via mandatory military service.
I can't believe that so many people still haven't figured him out (which is also true for the previous American and current Russian presidents, who have similarly repulsive personalities).
That only makes it even more impressive that he has managed to accomplish truly world-changing things like building reusable rockets or practical mass-market EV's. Most "narcissistic, manipulative, dishonest, hateful, lacking empathy, attention-seeking, unhinged" folks wouldn't manage to do anything even marginally worthwhile, even in such a key position as, e.g. being president of a large superpower. (Also, let's give the previous U.S. president credit where credit is due; he might have a repulsive personality, but at least he didn't start any foolish wars! So there's that, too.)
Look at Bill Gates for another example. His early business dealings are well known to be ruthless and he pushed MS at the cost of a lot of things, but now he uses his wealth mostly for good.
As much as we'd like, we really can't reduce people to "good person" and "bad person".
> As much as we'd like, we really can't reduce people to "good person" and "bad person".
I don't find that difficult at all. Yes, obviously literally every single person have good and bad characteristics and have done good and bad things. But as a human being I'm perfectly able to look at those things in aggregate and decide for myself if I think they tally up to someone being what I would personally consider a good or bad person.
All 3 of them took wealth away from paper-millionaire shareholders of competing companies (eg. Netscape) and delivered superior quality of life to the consumer. Nobody sheds a tear for the paper-millionaires, rightfully so. It's only their greed which didn't make them cashout before Standard Oil/Microsoft eventually outcompeted them delivering a better product to the consumer.
Same with Facebook v. Myspace and Google v. Yahoo. Nobody sheds a tear for the shareholders of Myspace and Yahoo. Rightfully so.
Musk is robbing taxpayers in the form of subsidies and tax credits for luxury vehicles which all end up parked in front of Bel Air mansions and 5th Avenue shops.
On top of that he already said that he'll never do philantropy
Well actually... Microsoft was almost broken up by the government for what it did to Netscape, until there was a change of US Presidential administration, after which Microsoft was given a wrist slap, and then 9/11 immediately hit, which made the issue disappear from public consciousness.
I'm not exaggerating here: the Department of Justice announced it was no longer seeking to break up Microsoft in September 2001. See this article from the WSJ literally the day before 9/11: https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB1000076767888491506
It should have been given the medal of freedom instead...those crackpots at netscape wanted to charge people money for the browser.
Only former netscape shareholders could possibly defend Netscape.
Microsoft I will always defend, the decision by Gates and Ballmer to allow piracy enabled me and my family to always have the latest version of Windows/Word/Encarta/IE even though we were poor.
Especially Carnegie made life miserable for tens of thousands of his workers. No amount of charity can make up for the amount of suffering he caused.
It is clearly non-trivial to rally a group of people, funding sources, and, er, marketing resources to accomplish what he has accomplished.
Evidence: nobody else has done it.
Er... what? He's focussed his attention on some specific problems and made good progress solving them; people have been doing that for as long as there have been people.
Sure he's had great success and clearly does a lot of things well. He's not singular in that.
Musk has been at the helm of Tesla for 20 years. The past year was a very slow year for the car selling business except for luxury vehicles of course (which Tesla is). In 2021 Teslas accounted for approx. 1% of total global vehicles sales.
1% in 20 years. World-changing.
He's not Jesus, but he's also not Bernie Madoff.
Musk was CEO of Paypal for 6 months back in 2001. He was fired because he was running the company into the ground. Peter Thiel managed to save the company and sell it to Ebay
> SpaceX is the cheapest way to get cargo into space
Is the American consumer in need to send any cargo to the ISS? SpaceX is a graft built on big government
> Tesla is 3x profit per car versus Ford/GM
30 Billions of subsidies and credits in 20 years to arrive to the same financial achievement as Ferrari in the 90s. Only Teslas don't look like Ferraris unfortunately. They are also still more scarce than Ferraris, if not on the roads, for sure in absolute numbers. Pretty poor performance when the Italian brand makes 9,000-12,000 cars per year dependant upon macroeconomic enviornoment.
Also they are cooking the books. Everybody who looks at musk and how it operates understands this. He believes in manifestation and faking it till you make it.
Any additional references or reading material that could help break this down?
Elon was gone way before he could have had any influence on modern Paypal's profitability.
>SpaceX is the cheapest way to get cargo into space
Well, we don't know the financials, so it could be cheaper for the customer, while burning investor capital. But this one seems like money-well-spent, at least.
>Tesla is 3x profit per car versus Ford/GM
Are you talking about gross profit margins?
I always find it so amusing when the best thing anyone can say about our previous White House occupant is what he DIDN'T do (and not for lack of trying!). As if a pet rock or farm animal couldn't have accomplished the same feat.
Is it rare? We just had a president with similar traits
Those employees trapped on an island for months developing SpaceX rockets in miserable conditions did the work.
He wasn't unhinged.
He was definitely self aggrandizing and attention seeking.
Jobs was an asshole, but he was an adult asshole. A mature asshole. He wasn't a juvenile asshole. Both Musk and Trump give the impression of having the emotional maturity of a pre-teen.
Much of that is addressed in McGilchrist’s The Divided Brain.
I don’t think Musk is a bad person, but he is displaying like many "high functioning" people in our current economic and political systems, signs of lack of empathy, hyper materialist views, etc.
Unsurprisingly left hemisphere dominant people (who are unbalanced), can do very well in systems that are designed by the left hemisphere and reward everything the left hemisphere is about (control, supposed knowledge of how reality works or is, power, inflated sense of self and ideas of being "self made" etc.)
On the contrary, our world is practically made for those people to be successful. Psychopaths do great in unbridled capitalism.
I mean, you’ll alienate yourself from everyone, but you’ll be rich!
Source: My wife professionally studies personality disorders
So not sure what's your point. But I like the passive aggressive nature of your comment.
_money_
Anyone with enough billions can do what Elon has done.
2) Neither Boeing nor Ford have put a car into a trans-Martian Solar orbit, and they did start with billions
Good?
This reminds me of the scene from the film "Tin Cup" where he asks "You ever shoot par with a 7 iron?" and his rival replies "Hell Roy, it never even occurred to me to try." (The backstory being that Tin Cup and his caddy broke all of his other golf clubs in a childish argument.)
Musk pointed a rocket at the sky and pressed play. In terms of difficulty, boosting a car into an extended orbit is trivial. Manoeuvring a "space plane" to intersect multiple satellites, grab them and return to earth, that is orders of magnitude harder.
Ford make cheap cars world wide at volume, and pioneered the production line.
as for point one, like me, he was in the right place at the right time. I am rich because I joined the right start up and got bought out. yeah I worked hard, but not anywhere near hard enough to justify the money I got.
The same with musk.
Let me rephrase:
SpaceX was valued at less than one billion dollars when they launched the first Falcon 9 to orbit.
The total money raised in the investment rounds only exceeded $1 billion in 2015, after 13 launches.
Total raised from investors only exceeded $2 billion, enough to be called “billions” plural, in Jan 2019, which is just before SpaceX got Starhopper off the ground.
https://craft.co/spacex/funding-rounds
In comparison, the per-launch cost of the SLS is estimated to be “over $2 billion”, plus dev cost, and an Orion capsule would be extra.
SpaceX didn’t need billions to achieve impressive things, just for ridiculous things like “enable the colonisation of Mars”.
Despite which SLS is still not flying and Starliner is stuck in test flights and not human certified, despite both having been started a bit before SpaceX was being valued as high as $1.3 billion.
Similar with Ford: fantastic past! Yet the money from that past win didn’t let them do what Musk did.
QED, “billions” are not enough by themselves.
(Something something Romans: https://youtu.be/Qc7HmhrgTuQ).
Nobody should be surprised when a CEO acts like a jagoff, that's par for the course.
To wit, so quickly HN forgets about Jobs and his cult of personality. Ten years ago, it felt like half of the people on this forum had their lips so far up Jobs' sphincter that they could see the sunlight through his nostrils. Now it seems this adulation has found a new outlet.
It's also a reminder that things can always become worse. At least Jobs managed to first put a phone in every pocket and only then got paid for it. Like Gates with PCs.
Also Jobs was paid a salary because his hubris got himself outed from Apple the first time around and his ownership was down to single digits.
Musk first sued for the right to be called the founder of Tesla , he then managed to inflate a financial bubble to get paid upfront for work he'll never deliver.
It's the gilded age of frauds out there.
It sounds as if Musk and Twitter are a match made in heaven.
Personally I blame marvel movies. Many immature people think the world is a superhero flick and Elon Musk is a real-life Tony Stark: arrogant billionaire genius who is going to fix the world from his superlab.
If you cheer the part you're supposed to laugh at/feel sad for, I start to get a picture of what "dangerous" media could mean.
I'm Civil War he tries to kill the man who murdered his parents, for revenge, not justice.
Relevant smbc: https://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2305
He's always been like that - narcissistic, manipulative,
dishonest, hateful, lacking empathy, attention-seeking,
unhinged.
I can't believe that so many people still haven't
figured him out
We want to believe in the cool, if a bit unhinged, hero-engineer that builds all the cool stuff we were promised in all the sci-fi movies as kids but failed to materialize, such as Mars colonies and self-driving cars. A lot of that failure is due to some things being a ton harder in reality than fiction, but a lot is also due to a managerialist, short-term culture that no longer seems to be thinking big and taking risks. Musk is the avatar for those who want these cool things and kicks back against the prevailing culture - a real-life counterpart to the billionaire genius in the Marvel movies.
The problem is, of course, that Tony Stark is a fictional character and Musk is not. Not only has he been drinking his own kool aid of late, but he's not much of a hero either, rather a spoiled bully who punches down.
And Tesla is hardly a juggernaut, their cars have horrible build quality (speaking as someone who owns a Tesla) and are likely to face stiff competition in the next five years from companies that know how to actually build cars.
His fans are supporting the savior complex because he's virtually the only one who is actively making a better future in a significant way. While everything else is crumbling. They forgive the mistakes he makes given that context.
If Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, TheBoringScam etc. disappeared overnight, consumers quality of life would not be affected one bit. It's very similar to Ferrari or Tiffany&CO going under..it's meh. Contrast that with Exxon, Saudi Aramco, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Walmart, Costco, VW, Daimler...
There are unknown private companies such as Vitol selling 300bn dollars worth of products per year. Do you know Vitol? No? Well why would you...the CEO isn't constantly shitposting on twitter.
Musk is like Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden etc. What you call success is what people who don't fall for cult of personality call "being a BS-seller". Convincing fans and supporters that they are some sort of hero against dark forces
When I see how small of a subset of the population actively use Twitter, or have even posted once, compared to the political power it has, it's hard for me to argue we're better with it around.
Having all of those people, plus pretty small proportion of "regular people", can make it really feel like everyone is on twitter. But the many of the heaviest "regular people" users are often actually those who are trying to promote some agenda, which can be one that is very not-representative of the public at large.
But this feeling of everyone being on there, means that if a small group of vocal participants who have an agenda can get something trending, especially if they can do with with only limited pushback from other groups, it makes it feel like something everyone cares about. Worse is that the algorithm tends to promote extreme views a lot because they get more interactions.
Now the influencers, politicians, celebrities, journalists, etc are not very much not immune to mistaking an artificially algorithmically inflated hot take by a tiny but vocal minority on twitter as representing a consensus of a huge group of regular people on twitter. The next thing you know, the current twitter outrage is on the news, and your favorite celebs are probably talking about it both on and off twitter.
This can cause people who never would have seen or interacted with the twitter controversy to become involved. Obviously if the news is talking about it, this is a big thing that a very sizable chink of the population is feeling, right? It could not possibly be not something initially stirred up by at most few hundred extremists of some form on Twitter, right? Wrong.
The solution already exists and it's called "public transport".
I suspect this might be due to being surrounded by people who are too impressed by him to called out an idea when it's not sound.
Then the memes, then the crypto tokens, then it just got all weird so I stopped listening.
He divorced his wife, starts dating actresses and musicians, the latter turns him on to smoking pot and he thinks to himself, "Hey, I'm now a cool guy who smokes pot. I need to show people I'm a cool guy who smokes pot" and goes on Joe Rogan and shows off his new coolness. Same thing with his twitter antics.
The first time I heard him speak was watching clips from his solar roof announcements. He had the charisma and presentation skills of a 4th grader giving a book report.
Squaring his public behaviour with his presumed intelligence suggests that he's doing all this for some specific purpose. Either it's marketing to a certain contingent that he's interested in selling to. Perhaps it's brand building to help hiring or something else for one of his companies. His movie cameos, shitposts etc. all seem to be calculated to create a connection between him and a younger demographic. Or maybe, I'm over intellectualising and he's just drunk on his own image or power. Can't really say.
I don't particularly "like" the guy. But then again, I make it a point to try not to have an emotional opinion about any public figure. The default position is "ignore" and that's where I'm still at.
> I explain that needing someone so badly that you feel like nothing without them is textbook codependence. Musk disagrees. Strongly. “It’s not true,” he replies petulantly. “I will never be happy without having someone. Going to sleep alone kills me.” He hesitates, shakes his head, falters…
He’s been in desperate need of therapy for a long time. It’s sad in some ways. He is one of the most brilliant men alive, but he would be 10x happier and more effective if he worked on himself as hard as he works his companies.
[0] https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/elon-m...
I wonder where this notion started. Tesla was an existing company he bought and all the heavy lifting a SpaceX was done by other people. He made some good business calls, but I’d say a lot of his success stems from being at the right place, at the right time with the right wallet.
There was the direct half a billion dollars in loans the government gave Tesla after the financial crisis without which it would have collapsed. But even more so, the only reason Tesla could survive financially during the 2010s was a combination of government subsidies and government green credits which essentially had the likes of GM and Ford paying Tesla to build cars (so they could offset their credits).
What I will never get over is GM/Ford being so short sighted that they were willing to pay a competitor hundreds of millions of dollars, rather than investing in coming up with an electric platform of their own.
They kind of did have electric platforms that never sold well. They were probably of the mindset that nobody really wanted these cars, too niche of a market for them to participate in other than the most basic of compliance cars.
A lot of the legacy US automakers barely survived the financial crisis. In this time period they're very risk adverse. They've made a few EV versions of their cars previously for compliance reasons, but they never really sell well and don't actually make the company any money. To them, it made sense to focus on producing the cars they know how to make with good margins to pay back the bailout money.
Looking back we can say they should have probably bothered to make actually decent EVs and market the hell out of them instead of half-assed retrofits of existing cars with half-baked electric powertrains. But I dunno, if I'm in that board room in 2008-2009 and someone says "lets bet the farm on products that lose money and nobody likes" vs "lets keep building trucks and SUVs that are shown to print money and maybe we'll actually make it out of this economic disaster", there's a good chance I'd have picked the "lets print money" option. Its only seeing the EV market today a decade+ later that we see there really is a market for decent EVs, but at the time that market definitely had not been proven.
Also, by the end of 2008 gas prices had fallen back down to ~$1.60/gal. Cheap gas was in, hybrids were out. Even the Prius began to struggle in sales compared to trucks and SUVs. Its easy to see the value of an EV with gas being >$4 on average, its harder when gasoline is cheap.
Setting aside any purely semantic disagreements (for example the fact that "one of the most brilliant men alive" is highly dependent on the number of other brilliant men around), I think part of what OP is arguing against is the implication that most people attribute a specific kind of genius to him (and OP should definitely step in to disagree with me here if I am mistaken). For example, most people may agree that Warren Buffet is a genius, but it's clear (to me at least), that they mean genius in a very different way in that context than when applied to Musk. The implication seems to strongly be that Musk is not merely a savvy businessman, but a "brilliant scientist" or "brilliant engineer" or something as well, something I think no one would assign to Buffet. Buffet bought Duracell, but no one believes he is key to battery technology. For the record, I am not arguing about whether Musk is or is not this kind of genius, just that Musk is a unique case in that the conversation exists on this axis, arguably much more so than even with Steve Jobs (who most people at best attribute "design genius" to, but will readily admit is not an "engineering genius", and in fact may even attribute the ability to see "past that" as one of his strengths). So I think the frustration I detect in this argument is that Musk seems to often be imagined in the same ranks as the actual Nikola Tesla perhaps, which they feel is unearned, and then the defense given is more appropriate for an Edison or Ford-esque "businessy crossover genius", vs. a description of direct technical accomplishments. Again, I am not arguing either way as to where he should be placed, just pointing out that I see a lot of this sort of "talking past each other", since "genius" colloquially implies something that doesn't make "Steve Jobs" immediately come to mind, vs. Einstein.
> He’s been in desperate need of therapy for a long time. It’s sad in some ways. He is one of the most brilliant men alive, but he would be 10x happier and more effective if he worked on himself as hard as he works his companies.
He started diagnosing people online either without meeting them or knowing them personally. It's sad in some ways. I'm sure he's a decent engineer but he'd be 10x happier and more effective if he focused on himself and not trying to find fault in others.
I’ll leave. Peace
Are you saying you can hurl personal insults, but others can't at you?
!) OP says "[Elon Musk] is one of the most brilliant men alive" and suggests he would benefit from therapy. IMO this isn't really a personal insult towards Elon.
2) Your "ad lib" intentionally excluded the "brilliant man" part of OP's comment and replaces it with "decent engineer." This makes your comment a direct insult to OP. Implying that they're not a good engineer.
3) Elon Musk is a public figure. The richest man alive. Even if OP was insulting Elon, that is completely different from what you're doing. Criticizing people in power is good. Insulting strangers online is mean.
4) OP didn't even diagnose Elon with codependence, that was the Rolling Stone author. Suggesting someone could benefit from therapy is not a diagnosis.
5) Ironically OP rarely comments on HN while you're commenting several times a day. With lots of negative, argumentative, and judgemental comments.
"Personal attacks are not allowed on HN" — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9683927
Maybe GP shouldn't insult people if they don't have thick enough skin to be treated the same.
I don't care if you're famous or not, I'll give you the same tone as you give others.
But yes I can be an asshole, never claimed not to be. I can also be nice. They way I treat people depends on how they treat others.
There are other similarities - impulsiveness in business, Twitter obsession, strong COVID downplaying...
The one thing I respect though (and expect most people here won't) is that he appears to have the "nouveau riche" disrespect for the establishment, and doesn't feel he needs to kiss anyone's ass or play by the rules in a system that is already rigged for rich people. The fact that he has annoyed so many, especially elite/establishment figures, is a good thing. I'd much rather see him use his wealth to piss off the establishment than just to grow richer safely, which he could easily do. So maybe his annoying behavior is at least partially by design, and the fact that it bothers everyone is exactly what he wants, which I think deserves some respect.
Censorship is the tool of the establishment. Free speech gives power to the people. That's as anti-establishment as it gets.
You've fallen for a warped definition of free speech and censorship that is endlessly regurgitated by NPCs.
(For this reason, in a world where Musk already controlled Twitter, I would oppose anything that increased his leverage w.r.t. Facebook, because yes, you're correct that Musk's biases are not harmless.)
Is this the new trend? Whenever a wealthy person turns out to be stupid, a certain group of people say "he's sticking it to the establishment"?
Just a recent wave of populists?
The appearance of indecisiveness and disorderliness is because he's doings things nobody has done before. And that's how that sort of thing looks.
Indecisiveness and disorderliness are the least of his problems, at least as far as the public is concerned.
He's a bully and he's untrustworthy.
To the comments of him not wanting to talk to the press most of the time because it's boring ... do you guys know how boring talking to the press is? You get equal parts adoration and pot shots without actually gaining anything but trying to get a message threw. There are very few enlightening moments in dealing with press and podcasts and you are constantly guarded about some asinine sound byte taken out of context. It's not like the podcast/press corps are typically deeply knowledgeable and are going to bring up some new idea to help you out. It's about getting a message out to different groups of people and it is really boring/wearing if you don't like saying the same thing over and over again.
I guess the saying goes - haters are going to hate as is deeply visible on the thread.
Most of his ideas aren't even something anyone should deliver. Hyperloop and Boring Company are terrible ideas.
Meanwhile everything else is over-promise/under-deliver.
Compared to the marketing bluster I see from the old aerospace companies and greenwashing from older car companies, however, he’s a spectacular breath of fresh air with his honesty, openness, and willingness to say things have a less than 100% chance of success.
And I say that despite agreeing with you about Hyperloop and TBC.
He promises a lot, but to say he didn't also achieve a lot would be lying.
Not sure how much cheaper SpaceX launches are for comparable payloads and orbits. I'd suspect they are, with e.g. Ariane developed for other thongs than LEO launches. As SpaceX isn't public wr don't have any reliable numbers. Based on some old leaked material, it is less than sure whether or not SpaceX is coonsiderably cheaper than the competition. Regardless, SpaceX is impressive.
If Starlink is actually sustainable and profitable has to be seen, it could as well just be a way to push SpaceX profitabiliy further down the road through a Starlink IPO. Now way to tell either way.
The direct competitor to SpaceX is the Space Launch System [0], with a cost of over two billion per launch. SpaceX charges below 100M$ [1] (and has cheaper options available [2]) and you can actually buy it right now (EDIT: although it's true that Ariane is in the same ballpark).
> If Starlink is actually sustainable and profitable has to be seen, it could as well just be a way to push SpaceX profitabiliy further down the road through a Starlink IPO. Now way to tell either way.
Whether a business can survive in the long term is never 100%. Still, you, as an average consumer, can order a satellite dish and get fast and mostly reliable internet for a reasonable-ish price right now. I'd say that checks as delivered.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Launch_System
You forgot Ariane Space. And the 100 million ballpark numbet is for Ariane 5, a rocket initially developed for a European shuttle program and not commercial, cheap satelite launches.
Edit: Starlonk is cheaper than alternative satelite provoders. Whether or not this is selling dollars for cents is the question, one that cannot be answered by Starlonk's existence itself.
Ariane V, delta, and soyuz launches are all cheaper per kilogram than SpaceX.
Look on Wikipedia, the sideboard quotes cost per launch as:
> Over US$2 billion excluding development (estimate)
I'm not aware of the pricing of Soyuz and Ariane V, though.
Both of which are much more SpaceX alternatives than SLS.
You're also understating Tesla's significance. No surprise, I guess.
I mean, I don't think he's Tony Stark either, but stop cherry picking.
But it's still not a good idea to treat any of his announcements or ideas as anything near a sure thing. His bullshitting still has a fairly high chance of turning out as bullshit.
"Steve Jobs delivers? Ha! The Lisa, Apple III, Pixar Computer, Next Computer. Checkmate!"
More background if you’ve not come across intermittent reinforcement
https://www.nirandfar.com/want-to-hook-your-users-drive-them...
Innovation does not mean only "coming up with something never yet seen". This is rare. Innovation also means making things more streamlined, efficient, more widely available, more capable.
Starlink is a huge boon in places like Mariupol right now. Its capability matters, even though a random person from London can get cheaper service by fibre.
He's such a polarizing figure folks can't seem to detach the worthwhile things he's done from all his other flaws. Elon isn't particularly impressive as an engineer or scientist, but incredibly impressive as a product and business person. Realize that he's a brand, and try not to fall for the marketing.
Its just a prank bro.
There's an obvious immaturity there too, wherein he responds to any criticism, hint that he may be wrong, or regulatory effort with the equivalent of a childish "you're just stupid!"
His battles with the SEC are a classic example, and it would be on-brand if this Twitter deal was as much about thumbing the eye of regulators as anything else. His announcement today had at one point caused a 20% dip in Twitter's pre-market price and 5% bump for Tesla's. The entire ride has been an exercise in manipulation.
So, I've wondered at times if a lot of this superiority act is really just deep insecurity, and he needs the world to constantly reassure him that he's as smart as he needs them to believe he is. When you look at the attention-seeking behavior you mentioned, it definitely aligns.
In terms of his behavior you speak of - could be right, could be wrong. I don't think he needs the reinforcement at this point. He's already proved himself - he now just needs to keep executing. My concern is that he doesn't have the energy, focus and clarity of thought to make it happen.
Also I do have legit concerns on the mental health of our older twitter guys (> 50 ) as I have noticed there has been a lot of trolling poor behavior in that crowd and a turn to the hard right. Maybe it's the social validation needed at a later age?
We're saying the same thing. Yes, the deal itself inflated the price. But, Musk announcing today that the deal was on hold pending proof of the fake account numbers contributed to the steep pull back. Musk did not have to make the announcement publicly, and he knew what would happen when he did.
Now, guess what happens to the price when he comes out next week and says the numbers he sought were proven to his satisfaction.
He's been playing a deal-on, deal-off game from the start and the stock has responded accordingly. He has a history of enjoying that market manipulation power, including on the crypto side.
He's been slapped for it by the SEC for his other companies, and has made no secret about his disdain for that fact.
>He's already proved himself
Insecurity is frequently not rooted in reality. Musk knows he's a smart guy, but the kind of insecurity I'm talking about may never be quenchable.
True about security. Maybe that insecurity is the force that has driven him to actually achieve what he has accomplished. Sometimes your greatest asset can be your largest liability. Let's hope it stays on the asset side - for all of our sakes.
The problem, of course, is that it can also create toxicity. And, Musk being a very powerful man can make that a dangerous thing. I think that's what you're alluding to.
My biggest concern is his apparent belief that his power and "contributions to society" mean he should be beyond accountability or should be able to decide which rules apply to him. That's the stuff of dystopian future sci-fi.
In fact, it concerns me when people believe they should be able to unilaterally decide what rules apply to anyone.
Hope his ego comes back to earth and he can keep executing. Will keep watching.
It can be argued that the whole idea of Musk buying Twitter is unhinged, but it doesn’t seem much different to Bezos buying WaPo, it’s simply on a larger scale. Media companies provide good political power/$ value to billionaires.
Both amount to celebrity worship. We enable the drama which feeds off both the love AND the hate.
I posit that mature intelligent people don't care about Elon.
Our rallying for or railing against him, is an expression of our own narcissism, as if our individual opinions of him change literally anything in the world.
People need to grow up and focus on their own lives and changing things within their power.
If I discuss with somebody and they agree with me that Musk is a conman and a cult leader, chances are they have the same mental framework around other broader things such as how SV has become a hotspot for cults.
How maybe it's time to get out of such hotspot for cults, how maybe the template for success isn't inflating a financial bubble such as Tesla but going old school like Microsoft, without raising any money, going straight to building products and attack Goliath without fear like they did with IBM, not in the press but in the marketplace.
And Musks politics are similar: dumb, but also dumb in exactly the same half-informed wannabe libertarian 20-year old American guy way as half the people on Reddit.
It’s really rather strange, because Musk isn’t anywhere close to normal in many other ways, and good ways, too. Making five or six businesses work, some at the same time, with only two or three duds along the way, is far ahead of anyone else and can almost claim statistical significance.
He didn't create the first mass market modern EV (that was Nissan), but he did what the rest of the auto industry could have but refused to do: Reverse the polarity of the desirability of EVs.
His views on metropolitan public transit and car facilitated sprawl are backward, but I doubt most traditional auto executives think any differently (just look at the amazing metro system in the Detroit area! /s), they just don't voice it as openly.
He has tons of money and power but feels little accountability to anyone, not even his shareholders, much less any community, country, or society.
You might say that's great, that it frees him to think "outside the box". That is true, but societal obligations are not all bad - they ground a wealthy and powerful person in the reality of people who have far less power than them, and temper some of the blindness brought on by their narcissism.
That's a pretty big deal though, since businesses usually run on marketing, and not on raw engineering prowess. Without great marketing, you can't even attract great engineers.
Some people argue that the Nazis were as successful as they were due to propaganda (my final thesis at school was about Goebbels) - a sibling of marketing. Marketing rules the world.
Trump was the first president since the 80’s/early 90’s not to get a second term. Acting like an asshole only gets you so far maybe until people grow tired of it.
Putin is another example. Being a ruthless, smart sociopath got him all his power, being an idiot once lost him almost everything.
The worst case scenario is a civil war like the one that followed their military collapse in WWI. Only with nukes in the mix. Yuck.
At the same time, the Ukrainians are receiving enormous amounts of high tech equipment from a coalition of states that, taken together, is about 30 times as rich as Russia and much more technologically capable.
The Russians already had to abandon their Kiev push and now are retreating from the Kharkiv region, unable to take a city located mere 25 miles from their own border and next to the major Russian military hub of Belgorod.
Three or four months of further attrition warfare like that and they will have nothing left to deploy into battle.
Nor the unrest in the US about spending $50B+ in foreign aid while (literally) letting US babies starve?
Nor the inflation and supply shortages caused by lack of Ukrainian and Russia supplies to the West/abroad?
Nor our allies turning against us — eg, Saudi Arabia and Mexico challenging US foreign policy or the massive decrease in support between votes in the UN?
And you believe that Ukraine and it’s backers can sustain another 3-4 months of this combat? — and then muster the forces to expel Russia from Donbas and Crimea?
Americans usually do not riot over money spent on the armed forces, otherwise the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns would have led to a country collapse back home - both were an order of magnitude more expensive. I would even say that Americans are, of all the Western nations, the most complacent about high military spending.
Inflation and supply shortages are a real thing, yes. Definitely worrisome. But if Russia can be knocked down from their imperial madness for some decades, I'll buy it. Things look a lot different from behind the former Iron Curtain, where I am from; being under Russian yoke for decades will make you say "Never Again". Of all the tyrannies of Central Europe, only the Nazis were worse than the rule of the Kremlin.
I do not particularly care about Saudi Arabia (IMHO it is not our ally, but a major source of terrorism and extremism, exporting Wahhabist and Salafist ideology by the truckload) nor Mexico. (What reason would Mexico even have to join any pro-Russian coalition?) UN is generally a corrupt sham where the most useless diplomats and politicians of the world are disposed of.
Yes, I think that both Ukraine and its backers are by now invested enough that they will persist until they break the capability of Russia to engage in war. European land wars are like that and always have been. Americans may view things differently, because their wars are usually fought abroad. For Europe, war is an unpleasant, but historically familiar phenomenon, and countries generally only surrender if they really cannot fight anymore.
Which is the state I expect Russia to reach sooner. Their logistics are abysmal, their industry isn't in a state to support such attrition, and there isn't a single industrially developed country on Earth willing to throw material support behind them. They can get Eritrea to vote with them in the UN, but Eritrea won't supply them with tanks and planes.
And the only major power that was their hope, China, does not look willing to shackle itself to the corpse of a dying empire.
I guess we’ll have to see in a few months.
I appreciate the detailed answers!
The ruble currently trades stronger against the US dollar than September 2021.
This lack of respect of rules brought him to the top, and somewhere along the way he seems to have forgotten how to turn it off. So now he does whatever he wants whenever he wants and who cares about the consequences because why should he follow someone else’s rules? This greatly offends many people, while simultaneously attracting a fan club who love his rogue character.
Elon was bullied pretty heavily, and I think he clung to the nerds as his social savior in response, but he still doesn't have the self-confidence/spine to let his ideas stand on their own. It's kind of sad: He basically has a parasocial relationship with the geek/nerd community (and probably the rationalists too) and he thinks it's real, but it can't be when Elon brings his resources to bear whenever he's losing an argument.
If our elite really were a meritocracy Elon would be average among his peers, if that.
Said he will have full FSD in the next 6 months: https://youtu.be/VfyrQVhfGZc?t=3107
Will be landing uncrewed Starship on Mars in 3 to 5 years: https://youtu.be/VfyrQVhfGZc?t=2444
Most ironic of all is the talk about Tunnels: https://youtu.be/VfyrQVhfGZc?t=4000
It was a shame that the FT, with a London based journalist, forgot to ask the question if he has ever heard about this Sci-Fi tunnel transport system called the London Metro :-)
Now he has to work with a ton of contractual and legal issues, up to and including twitter being able to force him to go through with the deal, unless he can find clear evidence of fraud in their user numbers.
Think of it as simulated annealing [1].
Usually finds pretty decent extrema
Edit: Alas, it doesn't work anymore. Updates are welcome. Edit2: Updated!
I like your comparison with Big T. He is, in some sense, a sleeker and more savvy Trump. Trump does have a similar psychic energy to Elon, but he's an older model. He came from the TV world. Now, the TV world was pretty powerful -- it got DT elected president! But Americans are not living in the TV world this century; they're living in the social media world.
This is the origin of the Twitter thing. It's not about Twitter's profit, or free speech, or anything as lofty as that. Here's what happened with Twitter:
Trump got elected based, in part, on his statements on Twitter. Around the same time, Elon was astroturfing Reddit, Twitter, etc. to build the hype machine that eventually became the $1T social media product, Tesla.
Elon, consciously or not, came to realize that simply by his statements on Twitter, could manipulate the world to his whim. He fired the entire corporate PR team at Tesla. He realizes, why do I need a PR team? I can shape the narrative just as well with my social media account!
Then, BOOM! Trump gets banned from Twitter, and immediately disappears completely from discussion. Just like that, in the blink of an eye -- erased from public imagination. Do you remember how quickly this happened? He was black holed from the public imagination in a couple days. As soon as the trending hashtag disappeared, Trump was gone.
Elon saw this happen. He made the connection between his valuations and his Twitter account. And remember, at this point, Elon's compensation is basically tied entirely to the stock price. He realizes that leaving his podium on someone else's property is a mortal risk. And... here we are.
Twitter is pretty stupid not to have banned Elon as soon as he left the slightest hint of acquisition.
Musk does not come from a scientific or technical lineage: his father wasn't a geotechnical engineer, a computer programmer, or a physicist. He was a chiropractor. A chiropractor! This is the essence of Elon. He is the greatest influencer of our time.
All agents have two modes: exploiting and exploring
Indecisive and disorderly are the qualities of exploring.
Why is it disorderly to not want to acquire a company that may be lying about their figures?
There’s a lot of reasons to dislike Elon. The ‘pedo guy’ thing isn’t one of them.
Thai authorities told Elon as such, boys in the cave were already saved by the time he brought over the sub, and everything was fine.
Then that one specific diver comes out of nowhere and tweets that it was all just a PR stunt and that Elon could "shove that sub up where it hurts". While Elon's response was an immature retort, it is a bit disingenuous how people seem to imply that he lashed out at the diver out of nowhere with that insult just because his sub wasnt used for the incident. That wasn't an issue at all, and he took the rejection from Thai authorities just fine. It was one of the divers that decided to throw this random insult at him, and Elon's retort (no matter how appropriate or inappropriate it was) was just a "one-up" response. Immature and inappropriate response, sure. But let's not act as if he decided to lash out on some innocent guy out of nowhere.
Direct quote[0]: "Just as I didn’t literally mean he was a pedophile, I’m sure he didn’t literally mean shoving a sub up my a--".
0. https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/national-international/elon-...
What would we say of you, if your life were so public?
Sounds reasonable to confirm the actual number of spam accounts before spending 44 billion. Likewise I double check the service history of used cars too.
In other words, have you seen what tech stocks have done in the last week?
Elon doesn’t have the money to buy Twitter, and his lenders are getting nervous that it’s a bad investment for a juvenile prank.
You don't open your books to a competitor or in a hostile takeover situation.
The threat of the deal blowing up with so much on the line is what holds Twitter’s feet to the fire.
Based on the "Funding secured" or "Pedo guy" nonsense revealed in court documents, I have a pretty good idea how much due diligence was done prior to the offer: zero.
I have this speculative theory that Elon Musk's public behavior is a complex long term ruse. I suspect his odd behavior is intentionally designed to get other to underestimate him. Consider it a mental form of the drunken fist martial arts style [1], where a fighter will use unpredictable body movements to confuse the opponent.
I use the word "theory" intentionally. I have explainable reasons for how I formed this theory. But now is not the place for that.
If Trump is reelected this year, Republicans can thank Elon. He’s campaigning against democrats, wants Trump to be back on Twitter, said banning Trump was morally wrong (I guess letting the incitements of violence, lies about election fraud while committing the fraud himself, was morally acceptable to Elon).
If Elon Musk had shut the fuck up in 2010 I'd probably be calling for statues to be built of him.
Heck, narcissism is currency in Silicon Valley. I don’t know what else I’d call the whole “we’re changing the world through Ad Tech” shtick.
His business process is to try many things and fail a lot, nothing wrong with that as long as some of them succeed. He jumps into very hard challenges, then fails or iterates until there is success. His full automation of of Tesla factories with robots attempt cost Tesla several years, but Tesla is still success.
His marketing is full of bullshit. He he has at least 4 vaporware announcements for each real product. For example, that dancing robot man and self-driving cars “Next Year” every year since 2014.
Only against former Russians or Russians. Russia throws lots of empty threats, but has not threatened Musk personally.
Angering Xi and China can affect his business, so he shuts up like a good boy.
It's true that there are pockets of leftist activism here and there, but said activists have very little power or influence. There's no communist bogeyman waiting round the corner to redistribute your wealth (or whatever else it is that people imagine communism to be).
It's important to reiterate that liberal and progressive are not synonyms for leftism. Advocating for social change in and of itself is not leftism. More Black people on TV isn't leftism, and the notion is quite absurd, especially since it's far from true that everyone on TV is Black now.
The reason this is so important IMO is that we can't have productive discussions about social and political issues if we don't understand the basic terms and concepts under discussion.
As to Musk, I don't know what to think. He's certainly made some good business decisions, but he also goes off the deep end on occasion. I don't think calling him liberal really makes much sense. When you're one of the richest people in the world, your world view is undoubtedly much different than that of an average person.
And just in general the labels "liberal" and "conservative" aren't very meaningful, especially in that most people could be considered either depending on which issue you're looking at. And when you look at how people actually live and what they prioritize, the lines become even blurrier.
Elon Musk isn't an attention seeker and never has been. I don't get how people make this argument. Every chance he gets, he redirects praise to the people of his companies.
Take it easy on Biden. Many geriatric patients act strangely because their sense of self awareness has faded with age.
How many here would do what they consider right knowing they will be vilified for it.
He was The Left's darling, now he's The Right's darling.
Personally, I think he made a mistake. I feel like Elon wants to be liked, but the celebrity/media left are now going to have their go at him.
[my bad misunderstood what unhinged means.]
People are often looking for explanations for their personalities or interests. Look at how many people claim to be "on the spectrum" on HN underneath any article on the topic.
Universally, the assholes with spectrum disorders used their diagnosis to get away with abusive behaviour and, in two cases, sexual harassment.
So if he was diagnosed with Asperger's in the past, he would now be considered to be on the autism spectrum.
[1]: https://rarediseases.info.nih.gov/diseases/5855/asperger-syn...
[2]: Mirkovic B, Gérardin P (April 2019). "Asperger's syndrome: What to consider?". L'Encéphale. 45 (2): 169–174. doi:10.1016/j.encep.2018.11.005. PMID 30736970. S2CID 73452546. "Asperger's syndrome is a neurodevelopmental disorder that is part of the large family of autism spectrum disorders."
It IS a "clinically recognized term" in the sense that if you went to a mental health professional and said "I have Asperger's Syndrome" they might say politely "we don't call it that anymore" but it is very unlikely they would rudely say "I don't know what that is, it is not a clinically recognized term."
When there is distance he'll be able to be viewed with a dispassionate lens. Historians and future generations will put the mistakes in their proper context as they benefit from sustainable transport, reusable rocket ships and free speech in the public square.
Going to call bullshit on that one, because it's an easy way to discount all the downright shitty crap he's done.
I think it is amazing what Musk has accomplished, and if you look throughout history most hard-charging folks that get shit done tend to have a ton of narcissistic traits and are not really folks you'd want to be friends with. Both Newton and Edison were legendary assholes. Many of "... The Great" leaders throughout history achieved their "greatness" by mass murder.
So it's not incongruous at all to call out Elon for being a giant narcissistic, lying dickhead, and to also be in awe of his accomplishments.
I mean look at Bezos, he got into a fight with Trump, and the pentagon preferred Azure to AWS, all of a sudden. Yeah, and a year later that deal got cancelled too, by the next administration [1]. I mean Musk has a lot of business with Uncle Sam, he really can't play his own game, in terms of politics.
I mean, i mean, they really have a lot of 'leverage' with Musk, to begin with. I would guess that Musk would be looking for a way out of the twitter deal, in order to protect his business. Also the economy is going into a recession, therefore his deals with the various governments are going to be much more important. Look, there is even talk of Musk building an e-tank with a German firm, Rheinmetall [2]
[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/pentagon-terminates-controvers...
The Russians knocked out the entire Ukrainian SATCOM infrastructure at the start of the war, plus quite a few stations elsewhere in Europe; AFAIK none of them went online again. Electronic warfare at its finest. Once this happened, Starlink was used as a drop-in substitute and defeated all Russian attempts to knock it out too. The Ukrainians coordinate their artillery, drones etc. over Starlink and the Russians can ... gnash their teeth.
This is an impressive capability and it gives the U.S. a huge advantage in any potential future military conflict with a near-peer power. Advantages like that aren't discarded just because of random culture war flare-ups.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/04/08/us-quietl...
https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/spacex-ukraine-elon-musk-...
I just can never trust anything he says because he has a significant history of being indecisive and disorderly. This deal is a perfect demonstration of how I feel. What I can't really tell is if he was always like that or grew into it at one point.
Also, the guy is always going to extreme lengths to seek attention, just like one certain US politician...Something turns me off from these types of people.