And FWIW: if you really want to structure this in a shareholder-friendly way, Twitter can just pay Tesla a consulting fee. Given that they're a private company now, that's almost literally as simple as just writing a check.
[1] I mean, seriously, if "I'll buy TWTR for $40B!" didn't spook the market, you think they're really going to freak out about a few hundred hours of engineering time?
I don't remember Jobs promoting DogeCoin. Or sinking his company's stock by tweeting bullshit. Or yanking senior engineers away doing superficial code reviews at his latest private acquisition.
@kcplate
Site isn't allowing me to reply, but I guess I can edit here?
What I meant by scale was weighing CEOs or their behavior against each other. It sounded to me, and maybe I read it wrong, from the comment I replied to that Musk's issues were being levied against Musk with the implication (Their first sentence) Jobs didn't have issues like that. A better example of Jobs tanking Apple stock price was the partnership with Microsoft. At the time that was seen as Apple marrying the evil Jobs regularly criticized. So much for thinking different. But my point was the other things carried some form of risk and certainly didn't paint Jobs as not having character flaws.
So I'm in agreement with you, he's human, Musk is human, mistakes are allowed to be made without, I don't know, "cancelling" someone I guess. Maybe it's just fashionable to pick on Musk right now? I don't know some people are so judgmental. I mean honestly, what does the average HackerNews user know about the nature of the Tesla engineers reviewing Twitter code? While it could be a problem, it could also be legal and considered above board. No one here seems to know the contractual agreements and why would they? Companies don't publish every thing that runs across executives desks.
Of course there should be some slack given for indiscretions of youth. No one is born perfect. For adults though, let's keep our eyes wide open and praise the good works--not the flawed people who do them.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/08/05/how-bill-gates-mother-influe...
They’re already building their own tunnel boring equipment.
The company raised $675 million at a $5.65 billion valuation, putting it ahead of several S&P 500 stocks in market cap, closest to Alaska Airlines.
To say this is unusual is an understatement.
At this point in SpaceX history, the company had yet to launch Falcon 1.
I think a whole lot of people are going to be mightily shocked at how successful this company will turn out. In ten years, when it’s clear how successful it is, everyone will pretend the idea was stunningly obvious and was only successful through public financing, or something like that.
Raising money is just a con man thing, the boring company has achieved nothing new at all, like, nothing.
We're still waiting on all the other promises that just keep not coming, so no, I don't think we'll be surprised.
> it’s already building a massive transit project
It's only massive in terms of wasted taxpayer funds. The Vegas tunnel is a boondogle, and per Elon's signature style, completely unlike anything that he promised, their next tunnel will be the same.
> In ten years, when it’s clear how successful it is, everyone will pretend the idea was stunningly obvious and was only successful through public financing, or something like that.
I won't. If boring company has built any noteworthy tunnels within the next ten years, feel free to come back and have yourself a dropbox moment with my comment.
I'm confused, because you called-out the Vegas tunnel, but are you claiming a 30-mile, 55-station tunnel is not a massive project?
Beyond that, there are no taxpayer dollars used in the project. It's entirely privately financed. In fact, the system pays a concession fee to Las Vegas.
> If boring company has built any noteworthy tunnels within the next ten years
Well, TBC is already constructing the 55-station Las Vegas Loop as we speak. It's scheduled to open in 2 years, at least partially by Super Bowl LVIII in Vegas in February 2024. The entire system will not be done, but enough of it will be to be noteworthy.
> feel free to come back and have yourself a dropbox moment with my comment.
I will try to remember to do that! Don't worry, you won't be the only one who got this wrong.
The radical proposals in terms of stripping out safety equipment for operational tunnels may prod some development, but ultimately any gains here are not going to be captive and will just result in revised client expectations (outside Boring funding & delivering projects worth $10bn+ individually themselves, with no public involvement).
That is incorrect. That is how they started, but they are now using Prufrock 2, which is both designed and built by The Boring Company, though I agree there has yet to be much of a step change in technology. Prufrock 2 is not the fastest tunnel boring machine in the world, and its porpoising feature has had some setbacks, needing to be dug out.
But all of this kind of misses the point. It ultimately doesn't matter if the tunnel boring machine is extraordinarily better. The Boring Company is applying the exact same philosophies that has made Tesla and SpaceX successful: extreme vertical integration and rapid iteration.
What matters is that TBC controls the boring machine. They control the design, they control the manufacturing process, and they have a willingness to experiment and iterate. The company is 5 years old and is now on its fourth tunnel boring machine.
And given the design of TBC transportation systems, there's no reason you can't have a dozen tunnel boring machines running simultaneously.
There was nothing remarkable about Falcon 9 when it launched. It was old tech, with a few good ideas, and one killer feature: extraordinary cost savings.
Ultimately what matters in tunneling is the cost.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/oct/30/elon-musk...
When you have successes like Tesla and SpaceX and PayPal it doesn't really matter how many failures you have. This isn't like being an airline pilot where you're judged by your worst outing.
The thing is that they are just honest failures, they are just outright lies.
https://www.mediaite.com/opinion/elon-musk-is-pathologically...
https://insideevs.com/news/580787/elon-musk-tesla-private-tw...
https://usishield.com/36376/news/steve-wozniak-accuses-elon-...
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/04/elon-musk-twitter-te...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2021-11-12/carson-bloc...
Mark Spiegel: Elon Musk is ‘a pathological liar’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msxq2OkCXnE
The Fake Futurism of Elon Musk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5OtKEetGy2Y
DEBUNKING ELON MUSK Pt1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-FGwDDc-s8
The HYPERLOOP Will Never Work, And Here's Why https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQJgFh_e01g
- Electric cars only will build a more valuable company.
- I can launch more rockets then everyone else combined.
Were also lies at the time.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/oct/30/elon-musk...
It matters if you care about evaluating whether or not you should believe what Elon says.
Do I believe that Tesla will get to full self driving eventually? Yes.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/oct/30/elon-musk...
He is literally the richest man in the world. Do you think he isn’t a successful gambler because of a few $1 bets that haven’t paid off (yet on many) vs the several $1000 bets that have?
Only because Telsa stock is insanely overvalued. Due in large part to Musk's overhype of FSD.
The rocket landing stuff largely borrow from DC-X and the spinoff work at NASA (+Lars Blackmore), all originally Strategic Defense Initiative development.
He used all that money from Mike as collateral for loans to Tesla
Yet Elon's the only person/company who put those privileges to good use
I find it difficult to understand the level of aggressiveness he awakes in some people. Are they actually feeling hate or just camouflaging some other feelings? Envy? Injustice? Are they hating him on the behalf of others?
By definition. (Look up what "hate" means and what "rational" vs. "irrational" mean).
It is just as irrational to love him.
Musk has an actual hatedom of people who try and downplay every good thing he's done and every good trait he has while spreading bad rumours about him, both well founded (impulsive, stubborn, optimistic to delusional levels and not good with peoples feelings) and not (Musk knows nothing about rockets, paypal money came entirely from superrich daddy's slave labour emerald mines and no one wanted the mini submarine).
If you watch the EverydayAstronaut interviews with Musk it shows that he has a deep understanding of the engineering tradeoffs and design reasons for many components of the rocket, and in fact is being quite careful with what he can share due to not wanting to leak company secrets. In fact, some of the questions that were asked in the earlier interview were re-referenced in a later interview as having been considered and leading to design changes.
I think Musk is a smart engineering type who sees finance, PR, politics etc as just another engineering problem, with all the pros and cons that creates. He's had a ton of success in hard-tech fields just by not being an idiotic pointy-haired-boss in a world where finance and political people are repeatedly being put in charge of projects and companies whose tech they don't understand. This doesn't mean he is likeable, or someone you'd want to have a beer with, or moral, or anything else. But it does mean he is capable of managing a tech company better than most, if we use the success of the company as our capable-of-managing-a-company metric.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/oct/30/elon-musk...
Which interview specifically? from https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Everyday+Astron...
I said this on another thread but I will say it here too. Musk’s genius and value is not his engineering skill but his willingness to think about big possibilities and then be fearless and patient enough to make what many others think are risky (and stupid) bets on those possibilities.
We need folks like that. They move the needle far more than the random HN engineers who feel that the Musks and Edison’s of the world aren’t relevant because they “didn’t design or engineer” the technologies they made viable to the masses.
Musk and Edison’s roles—were not as the engineers of technology, but as the facilitators of the engineers.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/oct/30/elon-musk...
Is there maybe a source that substantiates a perspective of "theft"?
Or am I just missing that a rhetorical discussion is being had here?
If this wasn't in the realm of how moral calculations work in society, then you wouldn't need to make this argument. People do accept funny moral trades and it's not clear how the calculus works. Tesla shareholders accept the fact that the guy in charge sometimes plays games like "FUNDING SECURED $420", so the fact that some Tesla engineers were borrowed/contracted/whatever is just a tiny detail in the big picture.
In case you didn't notice, the whole stock market got hammered this year because the FED started raising interest rates.
Perhaps comparing the 43% drop over the last year to other comparable companies would provide a better picture.
1 Year TSLA: -43.28% GM: -29.99% FORD: -26.13% STLA: -33.09%
5 Years TSLA: 1,019% GM: -8.24% FORD: 9.24% STLA: -25.23%
I believe the criticism comes from the volatility of the company.
I prefer eccentric, which may be an advantage for him.
Given the PE, seems to me the shareholders have created the shareholder value.
It’s not hard to envision a potential business case
Musk, being Musk, will find this amusing and start auto-tweeting "Kill" videos of Tesla's racing with other cars on the freeway."104 Z06 kills on the West Coast Today!".
Self tweeting coming soon - self driving by the end of next year.
Musk’s job as CEO is to work in the best interests of the company. Using the company's resources to buy/build a completely unrelated entity for his personal gain is most definitely not ok.
If he wanted to do what you’re saying (enrich Tesla with those features), Tesla should be buying Twitter. The scenario you're presenting, by the way, is exactly how Facebook/Meta acquired Instagram. However Facebook acquired Instagram, not Zuckerberg personally.
But he almost certainly acted against the interests of the company he was hired to shepard and committed a civil offense against the shareholders.
Remember that SpaceX and Tesla do have a common VP for material engineering, Charles Kuehmann? It makes sense for them to share knowledge on materials.
In the same way, there may be a cause for sharing software engineering resources/know-how between Tesla and Twitter without actually merging the entire companies into one behemoth.
Actually, it's worse than that. They're working for a different, private company, one which happens to be owned by the CEO of TSLA, who has a legal and fiduciary duty to the TSLA shareholders.
You assume that money is not changing hands and that it’s off the books? Where is your evidence for that? You are making that assumption based off your own confirmation biases.
Nobody on here knows the details, this is just a rorschach test.
Sometimes I wonder if people genuinely stop and listen to themselves before they hit the reply button.
A rational person could argue that the health of twitter is relevant to the health of Elon who will do a better job as Tesla CEO if twitter does well.
Musk (who is definitely the beneficial owner of Twitter and probably of Tesla too) is providing "free" consulting service of Tesla employees for Twitter -> without an invoice and without tax. (or maybe there will be an invoice?)
In EU that should be taxed (and also invoiced) - with similar prices as a consulting provided by a consulting company that does code reviews. The tax office is interested most in the missing tax of course.
There’s very little here to make any kind of judgement from.
Perhaps they were being paid for some private work outside of their employment. Maybe there’s some kind of arrangement in place to cover the costs of their time. From the outside we simply don’t know.
That is a great idea, running ads in Tesla cars. They can introduce a monthly subscription to opt out of the ads.
If Twitter is paying above fair market rate, that's collusion to benefit Tesla at the expense of Twitter.
If Twitter is paying exactly fair market rate, why does it need to be Tesla employees? That starts to look like self-dealing to make Musk's live easier.
You can't really win in this situation, which is why any sane executive avoids such a conflict of interest in the first place.
(I'm not claiming there will be any repercussions mind you - if Musk got away with SolarCity he'll surely get away with this.)
It’s a terrible idea because it’s a nasty way to treat people at the acquired company and probably ineffective at getting any useful information, but Elon Musk has shown that he doesn’t have many scruples about that sort of thing.
But SpaceX, Tesla, and Twitter don't really have common ownership in the normal sense. They're not owned by the same holding or parent company, they're not owned by the same single person, one is public and two are private, etc.
If Tesla engineers are spending time on something not beneficial to Tesla but instead to Musk personally or to X Holdings, that's absolutely something Tesla shareholders could sue for.
In this case Musk could easily say he had spare capacity, and if there’s crossbilling (which can happen retroactively if there was an objection) there’s really nothing to sue over. If he can get tesla engineers to try to build a cave rescue submarine to buff his public persona he can get them to do this.
This is also why Musk can get away with it - he's got fanboys, albeit of slightly different types, dominating the shareholders in both cases. (In the case of Twitter he may even be personally the majority shareholder with no obligations beyond cash now, but who knows...)
We don't have really any visibility into what short- and long-term obligations Musk owes the various financing parties.
Edit: https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/saudis-kingdom-holding... says Saud is keeping their ownership stake post-merger (they just love free speech!), so I do not think Musk is a 100% shareholder.
To me it makes a lot of sense. I doubt they are reviewing the entire code base. It seems like Elon is particularly interested in the automated systems that control content and detect bots. To that end, Tesla has a lot of expertise in AI systems.
I’be been a software engineer for nearly 2 decades and have been involved in multiple technical due-diligence endeavors. At best, you’re just grokking the big-picture and looking for any major red flags. Getting involved in individual code reviews is not a useful exercise outside of understanding a team’s SDLC and various coding practices - for an org the size of Twitter all of that stuff should have been documented and shared during due diligence (which Musk waved) - injecting outside engineers into the code review process is just an expensive and sloppy way to uncover what could otherwise be gleaned in an easier fashion.
I do see one big red flag for Twitter: it now has leadership that doesn’t trust the engineering organization. For a technology company that can be fatal if not resolved quickly.
Do we have any reason to believe it was Tesla’s AI engineers?
How is this a counter point? How exactly doing superficial review of code they've never seen of a social network will help them with developing a phone?
1. Apple. Facebook. TikTok. It's a somewhat simple problem that at scale is often solved by simply spinning a PubSub channel per user because you no longer care.
2. To review that code you don't just grab people to spend an afternoon doing superficial reviews of code they've never seen.
How would you feel if he had Tesla assembly line workers renovate his house?
What a weird timeline we are living in..
This is basic, basic, basic corporate law. It's not a "weird timeline" and it is in no way specific to the tech industry.
Managers, directors, CEOs, etc. cannot have the corporation do services for them for free because this deprives the non-management shareholders of value. Using their position as manager to assign employees to work on their house is in effect causing the corporation to provide them with renovation services for free. This self-dealing would be grounds for a derivative suit.
Also, it only takes one shareholder (in principle) to make this an issue. Even if you and most Tesla longs think Musk earned the right to do a little self-dealing here and there, it is an open invitation for legal action by SEC and other shareholders.
If you owned 100% of the company then all of that wouldn't be an issue, but it's still not something any legal department would OK.
The comment above you is wrong to call it wage theft--that would refer to workers not being paid the higher of minimum or promised wage for the time worked.
You can only lose by trying to have a conversation with them.
What you’re describing as self dealing isn’t illegal, thousands of corporations are run this way every day as long as taxes are paid correctly on the fair value of any transactions between the companies in question. It doesn’t even have to be profitable, Tesla could categorize the work they are doing for Twitter 100 different ways; marketing, R&D, team building, training, whatever.
As for minority shareholders, they have completely arbitrary rights depending on the bylaws, articles of incorporation, etc. If they are lucky, they might be able to periodically vote for board members given the right class of shares. Otherwise they have pretty much 0 input into how a company is run.
Sure, but do you know this to be the case here? There are a whole lot of assumptions flying out here that Elon just went and poached a bunch of engineers from Tesla to work on Twitter on Tesla’s dime. Pretty sure no one commenting her on HN as any idea of what the deal and detail actually is, all we apparently know for sure from this article is that one or more Twitter folk think that one or more Tesla folks are looking at their code. Beyond that…no details are really known.
It may be poor options or even poor management but it isn't theft.
Unless Twitter is paying handsomely for the consultation?
or he just winged it and grabbed some engineers and said “come with me”…
Which is more in character for him?
Right? Tesla hasn't had General Counsel since 2019, and is not looking for one.
You are chastising me for pronouncing it bad?
This is literally a wint tweet lol 6/1/14 the wise man bowed his head solemnly and spoke: "theres actually zero difference between good & bad things. you imbecile. you f*%#% moron"
And... you approve of this? Or what? What exactly is your message here?
Personally what I think you should be doing is rush to buy Twitter (except, well, you can’t).
There are no stockholders. The company is now privately owned.
edit: in retrospect, I see that you're a new user. FYI: I've flagged this comment, but not the original, because you're spamming. Spam isn't cool.
> I'm not pissed and I am a stockholder.
Given that Tesla, not Twitter, is public, and the conversation was about Tesla stockholders, don't you think it would be better to assume that the comment above was written by a Tesla stockholder?
Self driving has a well defined, static problem space, with inputs that don't change often (how often do they come out with a new street sign?).
Twitter is combatting distributed adversaries who are constantly adjusting their approach in evading detection.
One of the things that makes safety critical applications like self driving so hard is they have such an abundance of low probability, high severity cases that it is very hard to define/test them all.
From that sense, they aren’t static and well defined because we can’t create a deterministic physical model (and often have to settle with wide levels of uncertainty).
Oh, that'll come.
They problem is so ill defined that it sometimes has to be modeled as random events instead of a deterministic physical process.
Bots on the other hand changes constantly - what is the definition of an abusive bot? What is the definition of spam? The adversaries on Twitter adapt not only their tactics but also their goals.
If its a dumb idea on Twitter/Musk's part but Tesla is fully compensated for their engineers' time, all is OK.
If its a great idea but Musk just assigned Tesla employees to do work that does not benefit Tesla and does benefit another company that he owns, that is an issue.
The scale of this is irrelevant. Absent fair compensation to Tesla, even one employee doing a day's work for Twitter is prohibited self-dealing. No one would bother filing a derivative suit over such a small amount, but SEC penalties could absolutely apply afaik.
Even if Twitter is paying much more than their salary costs, you still need to value the damage to the business by taking the crew away from the ship.
You can't just assume zero impact unless this was just a one-day workshop.
There are no stockholders. The company is now privately owned
Tesla is not his personal fiefdom. Stop.
"he's smart for breaking the laws so smartly, unlike you who are bound to thinking within the laws"
If anything it seems more concerning for Twitter, morale there must be just the best right now.
You’ve said this a couple times, it is incorrect. Pattern recognition is simultaneously a terrible way to attack bots, and a great way to kill lots of interesting uses of twitter. This field is much, much more complex than you are making it sound.
NLP is also absolutely not pattern recognition. Perhaps back in the day with expert systems, but that era is far behind us now.
Paypal hit the similar barriers for a fraud-sorting task, and even in that day they found that a hybrid approach, part AI part human solved the problem well enough for that company to surive.
It is entirely possible that a couple decades from now we'll have a range of words to cover this whole territory, but I don't think we do now (or you'd have used 'em and cited 'em, or I'd have encountered them.) That we don't yet is understandable, it's early days. Right now if we have a better word or phrase (goal is kinda self-referential) I don't know it - even if I'm talking about the pattern of balance, compostion, color choice and line that makes "art," the pattern that can be called "artistic" is pretty much the best I can do. Feel free to put forward a better word if you would. DALLE-E and Stable Diffusion do seem to be able to recognize and spit out artistic results (rather than ugly, inartistic results) to a surprisingly large extent.
There are a billion ways AI moderation could be done. Many will be worse than useless as you say. One thing I notice a lot is that bad recognition systems merely sort out whatever is odd; if you are eccentric (perhaps because you are ridiculously well-educated) or highly creative you may get sorted out and punished by crap "algorithms." They're cheap-like-borscht systems, they don't give a damn about recognizing or addressing edge cases. It wouldn't be too hard to I sense you've run into a lot of that too. That's one reason why you want both far better (more computationally expensive) nets/associated logic and at least one human in the loop. But as well, as stated, spending more and getting a more complex net that is actively looking for patterns of language that suggest mere (safe) eccentricity or over-education is a case in which more and more detailed pattern-recognition is called for, not less recognition of patterns.
It's absolutely true that in the past companies (looking at you Google, Facebook) have been primarily motivated to reduce the expense of moderation no matter how crude the results. Just to take expensive humans out of the loop, no matter what breaks. That gives exactly the crap results you cite.
But I think Elon is betting that much better AI hardware (from Tesla) and more sophisticed, expensive nets (fed much more data) can, together with humans, do a far better job at a big but affordable price. Part of that bet is, I think, that computing power will decline in price steeply over the next decade and more, so it's worth spending far more (in the short run) on the moderation task, to get it right, than has been spent by social media companies to date.
He wants a lot fewer posts killed, but the bot and fake nation-state-actor posts killed, etc. Hard task. I doubt he thinks that's a dead-easy task.
We will have self twetting twitters by next year.
In reality, the world leader in the application of machine learning and other AI tools to social media content right now is Twitter. They’re also probably the best at international policy and privacy law monitoring and litigation.
Twitter is flawed in many ways, as I think might be inevitable for any large social media platform, but the myth that has developed about them being wholly incompetent at all this is a bizarre one that’s unsupported by the evidence.
I don't doubt that Twitter is on the case, but I also don't doubt that better hardware and a different perspective on the software can help - plus I'm talking about a hybrid approach. The inflexibility of much modern software is stunning to us old folks, but this rather goes double with twitter, for me.
It also has to be said, as the whistleblower has said, that Twitter had a very large financial incentive for tolerating, not even detecting, large numbers of fake accounts and posts; and seems to have succummed to that. Hardly the first company that's happened to - I'd say it's closer to the norm.
Maybe they're Tesla engineers, but they're moonlighting on Twitters dime?
Eh, there are marketing synergies between Twitter and Tesla.
Tesla hasn't had General Counsel since 2019.
There are no stockholders. The company is now privately owned.
> The arrangement alarmed some longtime investors in SpaceX, including its largest outside backer, Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, some of the people said. The investors learned in recent months that despite the diversion of SpaceX resources and staffing to the fledgling Boring startup, it was Musk who was in line to receive almost all of any future profits, these people said.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/new-questions-over-elon-mu...
> In early 2018, The Boring Company was spun out from SpaceX and into a separate corporate entity.[27] Somewhat less than 10% of equity was given to early employees, and over 90% to Elon Musk. Subsequent concerns by SpaceX shareholders resulted in a December 2018 reallocation of 6% of The Boring Company's equity to SpaceX.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boring_Company#History
Basically he tried embezzlement.
If you want to sell your shares for 0$ that is up to you. On the flip side, I am happy to look through your personal holdings, and anything I think is worth $0, take for myself. You wouldnt mind now would you?
This is a tiny amount of money compared to the daily cost of running TSLA and would have zero actual impact to shareholder value. If it isn’t being accounted for correctly, there will be a tiny investor lawsuit and a tiny amount of money changing hands.
This is latching on to just anything to complain about and really detracts from the ability of elon critics to be taken seriously because it’s just complaining about a few pennies worth of shareholder value.
Software isn’t the same as making floor mats. Your major production factors are having people with the right skills, knowledge, and time to focus — while their salaries are a drop in Tesla’s daily operational cost, the real question should be how much it disrupts their development schedule. Given how far behind they are on features which they’ve already sold, to the point of having government investigations, I’d tend to think that the disruption of pulling them away from their planned work is a lot more expensive than just the time billed.
Remember SolarCity? SolarCity was one of Elon's companies. SpaceX had bought a large number of solar bonds. One interpretation of this was to keep the company afloat. A court disagreed [1]. When SolarCity became insolvent it was bought out by Tesla.
So one of Elon's companies bought out another of Elon's companies to save the third Elon company.
There is this myth that exists of Elon being some kind of tech deity but there's a much better case to be made that he's simply a highly privileged technocrat who has quite successfully failed upwards his entire career [2].
[1]: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/27/elon-musk-wins-shareholder-l...
[2]: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-many-failures-of-elon-...
Been there, done that.
- new materials from SpaceX make it into Tesla cars
- productions techniques from Tesla goes into SpaceX rockets
- Semiconductor teams from Starlink probably connected to Tesla
It mean the best engineers get even more opportunities. win-win
Less red tape, more work get done. I think we should all embrace that.
Our goal should be to make things better first and then to make money second to help us out make things even better at larger scale.
It was my understanding they use pretty standard steel alloys.
The Soviets figured it out during the end of the space race and US engineers basically assumed they were lying bc they thought the metallurgy was impossible.
Inconel is known in the US as it was invented there in the 1930s - well before Musk was born. They might be called superalloys, but there is nothing particularly sophisticated about them from a scientific perspective. SX300 / SX500 are minor revisions which take some R&D but technologically it is 1930's stuff.
The Raptors are reusable (even air-ignitable, with centisecond timing precision to achieve a specific thrust) engines with an oxygen-rich preburner, and to boot they have the highest chamber pressure of any rocket engine ever. Thus, they also have a very high (possibly highest, we don't know) pump pressure (the preburner _is_ the pump), and they're doing that with oxygen-rich combustion.
There is some crazy material making up that preburner chamber, and the pipes down to the pintles. Materials that until recently were though to be beyond manufacturing capability. And this is in a reusable engine that costs less than an RD-68. Frankly, it looks like magic.
> They might be called superalloys, but there is nothing particularly sophisticated about them
They needed a castable aluminum resistant to corrosion, rigid enough that didn’t need heat treatment.
From what I heard at Munroe they had to design a new alloy to meet all requirement and that is unheard of in the automotive market (off the shelf components culture)
It make sense that SpaceX had expert in that field (for turbine components)
While I would rather live in that world, you don't seem to have described America, corporate laws or capitalism. In fact, TSLA should be listed as a public benefit company if that's the case.
The true American dream!
Expert in data centers help Tesla build its cluster.
Experts on internet security help Tesla, SpaceX with their information security.
Seems like a drop of water. For something to be legally relevant it has to be significant.
There's a lesson here for all of us. If you think you're safe in your role because of some good work you did in the past you are wrong. You were paid for that work. It's gone now. Hopefully your employer recognises your ability and talent and believes you'll do good work again, but of they believe it was luck, or that you're now too old and stuck in your ways then your previous victories won't help you at all.
What happened in the past is a sunk cost. Using it as a basis for future decisions while ignoring the present is a terrible, terrible way to move forwards.
I don't know how you could possibly know that, that's an unfalsifiable claim.
I could make the opposite claim (that with a different CEO, Tesla would be worth ten times as much as it is now) and you couldn't disprove it.
That is unfalsifiable.
Would you be angry if he gave everyone a 2 week vacation as recognition for doing something good? Part of what motivates engineers is recognition, and being asked to work on some project outside the company for a few weeks is recognizing that your input as an engineer is that valued.