Show me somewhere, anywhere, where someone of any relevance says Musk is a "failure".
What people actually say is that he's not the uber-genius, gods-gift-to-humanity that he and his super supporters extoll.
Here's one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33390278
As for gods-gift-to-humanity, there are very, very, very few people who have contributed to humanity like he has.
Your link brings us to a 3-day old comment which argues SolarCity failed (which, yeah, nobody disagrees there) and that Musk "failed upwards" and is not a "tech deity". This is not claiming Musk is overall a "fraud and failure."
It’s totally legitimate for you to think that Musk is the target of unfair criticism, particularly around the influence he’s had on his businesses’ obvious successes. But you don’t have to build a straw man to make this argument. Virtually nobody would describe Musk as a failure - but they will argue frequently that he’s an arrogant narcissist, or that his success is unjustified. There’s plenty of criticism like that out there—justified and not—and it’s weird to make stuff up to get all “lol u mad bro” about.
Private Joker: I think I was trying to suggest something about the duality of man, sir.
People aren't pissing on him when he's right, they are pissing on him when he's wildly, wildly wrong, because he can't stay in his lane. Pedo guy submarine cave rescue is a great example of that. Covid will go away by April 2020 was another. Full Self-driving Tesla robotaxi that makes you money while you sleep in 201? is a third...
However that argument alone doesn’t support the posts conclusion: “he's simply a highly privileged technocrat who has quite successfully failed upwards his entire career”
Imagine how suffocating life would be for him if he endeavored to live up to the expectations of his detractors.
He would never start a company without being certain of success.
He’d be super nice to the diver (who told Elon to stick a submarine up his ass).
He’d never speculate about anything or discuss his vision for the future, because imperfect foresight makes people mad!
…and the haters would still hate. Happily for Elon, he seems content to be himself and deal with the silly complaints.
Pulling a publicity stunt while people's lives were literally on a deadline was not helpful, and only served to distract the professionals involved in the rescue.
Throwing a tantrum and calling the diver a paedophile when they declined (on the basis that the submarine would not be able to fit into the caves and thus would be unfit for purpose, assuming it could even be built before the trapped group were killed by the monsoon) was a spectacularly awful move. And that's just one of the many fiascos he's been involved in.
Elon may be a successful businessman but he is also a disaster of a human being and has thoroughly earned any "haters" he may possess.
So was everyone who offered to help the trapped kids presumed to be a self-serving asshole for doing so, or only Elon?
> Throwing a tantrum and calling the diver a paedophile when they declined (on the basis that the submarine would not be able to fit into the caves and thus would be unfit for purpose, assuming it could even be built before the trapped group were killed by the monsoon) was a spectacularly awful move.
But the diver didn't just decline. He declined and told Elon to stick the submarine up his ass on national television. In that context, Elon's reply is childish, sure, but you'll have to explain what makes it "spectacularly awful" and/or a "fiasco".
> Elon may be a successful businessman but he is also a disaster of a human being
Help me to understand the standard by which I can judge whether someone is a "disaster of a human being". Is one bad tweet sufficient? Or one bad tweet and one bad prediction regarding future tech? How many judgmental internet posts would be required to hit the standard? I'm genuinely curious.
From the abrupt change in discourse about Elon in the last couple years, I assume most are judging him by his politicos he recently started expressing.
I'm sure the offers of help from experienced cave divers, folk who could help with logistical support, etc. were appreciated. Even the SpaceX engineers and supplies Elon sent were probably appreciated (I could not find anything about them actually being used, although I did not search extensively).
A techbro CEO throwing out half-baked whimsical bullshit ideas for social media attention, not so much. Not to mention personally injecting himself into the situation, touring the rescue site, and otherwise getting in the way of the rescue workers.
>In that context, Elon's reply is childish, sure, but you'll have to explain what makes it "spectacularly awful" and/or a "fiasco".
Falsely accusing someone of being a paedophile is not just childish, if taken seriously it can completely derail a person's life, get them fired from their job, turn them into a social pariah, and even result in them being assaulted or killed by vigilantes. Thankfully no one took Elon seriously.
Even if the diver was impolite when calling Elon out on the submarine thing, it was a completely disproportionate escalation.
>Help me to understand the standard by which I can judge whether someone is a "disaster of a human being".
Making such judgements can be complex. But attempting to socially destroy a person who is literally risking their life [1] to rescue children from certain death because they were mildly rude when rebuking them for being an attention-seeking twit is about as clear a signal as you can get.
[1] and that was not a hypothetical risk, two of the other divers involved died either directly during or later as a result of injuries sustained during the rescue.
Elon/SpaceX's offer to help _was_ in fact appreciated by the lead diver.
Disingenuous, bad-faith half-truths are the most you will get out of the anti-Musk crowd.
It is simply too fashionable; and any iota of defense will get you labeled a boot-licking puppet.
It is just raw, distillable jealousy, combined with the new social paradigm of "this man is uber-bad and the single point of all problems" that long-Trump-Derangement-Syndrome has left ingrained into the thoughtless, NPC-eqsue masses.
Elon Musk is no worse than any other billionaire, and by many objective counts, the best yet for humanity.
You will be forgotten, he won't - and that pisses most off at a mammalian level.
Sometimes I think that the fact that he looks so superhuman sort of proves that wealth is not a meritocracy. If it were, Musk would be an average billionaire at best.
Business is about improving the quality of life of the consumer.
Musk never went directly at that, he always involved himself in industries whose main customer is Government, or that would not exist without Government.
Apple, Microsoft, Google, Walmart, JPM...those are real businesses, which would thrive even if Govt. expense were to plummet at 5% of GDP (actually they'd do much better).
If Govt. expense were to plummet at 5% of GDP all the functional companies which Musk has would go belly up, not to mention the scam ones such as the NeuraLink and Boring.
I'm not saying that's a bad thing. The hybrid contractor/govt model has many upsides. SpaceX deserves a lot of credit for what they've done, but that context is important when gushing about when big gambles pay off. Those risks may never occur in a different paradigm.
Commentators and pundits were fooled by GPS , Sat-TV and Internet and are extrapolating loads of quality of life which would come from space if only could be cheaper to send stuff up there.
The world is increasingly urbanised. Fiber and 5G for telecomms will always be cheaper in an urban setting compared with sat-internet.
Space is already paying for itself.
If SpaceX had failed to do the human launch, the cost would have been on SpaceX. As it is right now on Boeing.
This is not how govt launches work. The payload (which is sometimes worth more than the rocket) is self-insured, meaning SpaceX is not responsible for eating that cost if it's lost. They are paid for the service (i.e., the ride) but have little to no cost regarding the cargo on govt launches.
Whatever method or rocket design the govenrment uses this is always an issue. Just flying on a government provided rocket doesn't change that cargo is at risk of being lost because it is not insured. In this case the risk to the tax payer is always at risk, it has nothing to do with SpaceX as such or the method of rocket procurement.
But the way the contracting model has been changed, the fact is, if SpaceX had not performed on their development and test campaign, they would have been stuck with the cost of most of that. Just as Being likely had to eat 600M+ because of their delays.
So in terms of developing capabilities for the government to use, this was an incredibly low risk and cost effective one.
Yes, but this is somewhat missing the forest for the trees. The larger point is that relatively untested tech is going to be more expensive to insure because there is greater uncertainty. This makes it less economically viable until it proves itself to be reliable. Can a commercial company forego that and take on greater risk? Of course, but they aren't likely to because they are more risk-adverse for a variety of reasons. But because the govt is self-insured, the economic risk considerations related to that becomes a moot point. Meaning, the govt is in a unique position to take on risk to help an upstart like SpaceX. Note that 100% of Falcon Heavy contracts are govt (military/NASA).
>Just as Being likely had to eat 600M+ because of their delays.
But this is a different point. They are being penalized for contractual delays. This has the potential to increase risk because it incentivizes rushed development. We saw this with CST-100. The only reason it came to light is because the mission did not go as planned, and as a result NASA started to trigger additional oversight (which slows down development).
This is part of why the CCP can move faster than NASA. They don't have to build to the same requirements as an in-house NASA build. To an extent, all NASA cares about is the ride. That works well as long as things go as planned. As soon as they don't, NASA will start doing engaging more oversight. This has already happened with SpaceX, too. When some unfavorable things came to light, NASA wanted more govt in-person inspections/audits.
What we are seeing is actually the commercial company are far more willing to risk these things the governments.
Companies like Astra (not that I think they are good) almost celebrates blowing up rockets.
> Note that 100% of Falcon Heavy contracts are govt (military/NASA).
This is true but Falcon Heavy was developed on spec. DoD didn't pay for its development unlike for almost all other rockets the military uses or used historically.
> This has the potential to increase risk because it incentivizes rushed development. We saw this with CST-100. The only reason it came to light is because the mission did not go as planned, and as a result NASA started to trigger additional oversight (which slows down development).
Yes but it rewards those that do development well and punishes those that don't. Of course oversight and verification is still a function government has to provide for the goods they buy.
> This is part of why the CCP can move faster than NASA. They don't have to build to the same requirements as an in-house NASA build.
CCP is learning the same lessens that NASA has. They have constantly rockets blowing up. They will have to also establish internal requirements that they follow.
And honesty, in terms of rocket development there isn't much evidence that China is better or faster from what I can see. We also don't know how much China is spending on these things.
> As soon as they don't, NASA will start doing engaging more oversight. This has already happened with SpaceX, too. When some unfavorable things came to light, NASA wanted more govt in-person inspections/audits.
Sure they will check everything and want to know about potential problems. The intensive structure however is still aliened better. The functions of the different parts are aligned better. NASA can tell contracts to change some process and have done so before but that doesn't imply automatically that these contracts will then drop in efficiency to the point NASA would have been at.
NASA own efforts like Ares 1 were so catastrophic that basically convinced large parts of NASA to not try that again. And NASA had a huge amount of success with the new model.
>What we are seeing is actually the commercial company are far more willing to risk these things the governments.
My personal opinion is that that NASA (less so the military) are risk-adverse in terms of political risk. When there's little political risk, they are quite fine blowing stuff up to learn.
One thing that I've noticed is that commercial companies tend to take an engineering perspective and NASA tends to take a more fundamental science perspective. For example, when SpaceX had COPV issues, they were fine to just change the design and move on without understanding the root failure mechanism. NASA funded their own studies to try and understand what was going on. This is the direction I'd like to see the hybrid model continue.
I do think that contract changes can risk efficiency drops, though. Right now, CCP doesn't have to show a lot of their work. This may mean that their "efficiency" is a product of process gaps, rather than better processes. The CST-100 software validation was a prime example. It was a definite process gap that allowed them to get to launch quicker. If they were lucky and didn't run into issues, NASA would be none the wiser.
Tesla: Climate change political trend
SpaceX: Defense/National Pride political trend
Organic exports, investments and consumption would not be benefiting such companies, the big winners would be the real bona fide and non-political companies I already mentioned: Apple, Microsoft, Exxon, JPM, Google, Amazon, Walmart.
Meaning the stuff that people use daily as opposed to only reading about it in the tech and the financial press as aspirational goals after billions of dollars in subsidies and govt. contracts
If it's not DoD then it's military stuff from allies or Turkey, if it's not that then it's Starlink.
In any event the point still stands. This company only exists in the financial press and the tech press. Regular people aren't using SpaceX nor they ever will considering how the world is increasingly urbanised so sat-tv and sat-internet are dead on arrival matched against fiber and 5G. The only exception is maybe the yacht crowd but they aren't regular people.
Yes, you're plainly wrong. All Starlink customers may point to why.
The point doesn't seem to stand?
Also, at 100+Mbps, this is the first generation of the technology. Is it feasible that they hit 1Gpbs by end of decade? I wouldn't rule out the possibility.
Hell would freeze over before Musk would even dream about making a philantropic service for poor people, because that's what you are describing. The poorest of the poorest in the next 50 years will be the last 10-20% who for whatever reason remains stuck in the badlands as opposed to moving to the urbanized world
Starlink satellites spend a lot of time flying over Africa. And if it's priced at $110/month it will not see a lot of use. So for a very low marginal cost he can provide a very valuable service. Therefore I wouldn't be surprised if somebody talks him into giving it away for the next cause du jour, especially if its structured so he only gives away the service (low marginal cost) and not the terminals (high marginal cost).
DirecTV and Dish Network alone have over 30 million U.S. customers combined. Keep in mind Starlink has been engineered for portability unlike DirecTV and Dish. More than 11 million families own an RV. And 12 million own registered boats. How many own second homes? Starlink takes 2 minutes to setup and 2 minutes to tear down.
Back to residential service though. There are tens of millions of households that are limited by old copper lines that were never filled in or cable extensions that were never dug. Or if the cable does exist, it's still at slower speeds and certainly not gigabit. Relying on mobile isn't a great option as most services today still throttle speeds down to 600 kbps when exceeding 15GB a month (which is nothing these days).
But worldwide, including in all the BRICS countries and the global south that rapidly growing in GDP and global importance is about 2-3 billion people with varying levels of spotty, congested, unreliable internet. These communities are probably lucky if they have 4G in many cases. That market is worth hundreds of billions over the next few decades, even when adjusting for purchasing power. Easily.
And your assumptions about relative competitiveness vs the highest quality residential speeds (which are only largely available to people in dense urban cores) are perhaps one upgrade away from being achieved. They already solved the hardest problem with regards to satellite communication: latency. It will be interesting to see how far they can push the bandwidth at scale over the years.
Microsoft as made gigantic amount of money selling to government. So do large banks. GM and Ford have much larger better organized departments selling to the government. Amazon has huge contracts with DoD as well.
> Microsoft as made gigantic amount of money selling to government
Microsoft , you mean the company almost dissolved by the DOJ? I will retract my statements on Tesla being propped by cronysm when Govt. produces even 1/100th of scrutiny endured by Microsoft. Who am I kidding? It will never happen...for the DOJ to go after a company it needs to have market share of 70% and upwards, whereas despite billions of dollars in subsidies and credits Tesla can't even make it to 1% of yearly global new car sales.
1% in 20 years. Ladies and gentlemen the backbone of the global industrial economy. Not. However that's how the cult leader...ehm I mean the CEO advertises it to the world.
Great dominance in the Financial press, tech press and gossip press though. And surprisingly even on HN and reddit people have fallen for the scam.
> It's a company selling subsidised go-karts to rich people in California and New York due to the out-of-touch worries of neurotic politicians in D.C. , Glasgow, Davos and Paris.
Wow tell us how you really feel, you must feel so superior. Of course its just unsubstantiated nonsense.
So lets go threw some actual facts.
Most vehicles Tesla sells are pretty close to avg new sale car price. So I guess you can call everybody that buys a new rich if you want but Tesla is not really spacial or unique in terms of selling to rich people.
In terms of your 1%, they actually are more then 1%. 78 million are sold globally, Tesla this year will close to 1.5 million cars. Can you do the math? (And you can also do the numbers 12 month rolling if you don't want to include Q4 of this year). But don't let facts stop your rant.
And if you want to look at it in terms of profit, Tesla is way larger fraction of the automotive market then that.
And of course as far as your comment about how the press, the reality is Tesla profits this Quarter were higher then Ford and GM combined, close in profit to Toyota while having much better debt position and selling far fewer cars and models. And of course while still growing at incredible rates. Maybe just maybe that is why the financial press focuses on them more then many other companies.
Go and search some historically comparable companies in terms of revenue and profit growth and tell me how Tesla is doing badly.
> 1% in 20 years. Ladies and gentlemen the backbone of the global industrial economy. Not. However that's how the cult leader...ehm I mean the CEO advertises it to the world.
Have you actually done literally any research on the topic ever? Tesla is one of the faster growing manufacturing companies in history and doing that while also interdicting a product that had not existed to any series degree in the market before.
And Elon never said that Tesla is the 'backbone of global industrial economy' that just seems like something you made up. Please provide a source.
> whereas despite billions of dollars in subsidies and credits
In terms of subsidies Tesla got the same type of tax abatement's literally every large industrial player gets when making large. So if VW, Toyota or whoever had built a Gigafactory in Nevada they could have gotten the same kind of deal.
This is just a reality of the way the system works. It doesn't give Tesla some magical advantage that they can exploit against other companies. Its just how the economy works, you can like it or hate it, but as a reason why Tesla is successful its absurdly terrible argument. And its also not cash they can just spend, its just a reduced expenditure over the next 20 years.
So the idea that because of those subsidies Tesla got some competitive advantage is nonsense.
Another thing people mention is the tax credits program. This is a program that only applied to 250k cars and again was available 10 years after Tesla was funded. Again this provides no competitive advantage to Tesla, ever car company could take advantage of that. And GM and other companies used these credits too. So again to claim that Tesla success can be explained by this mostly falls flat.
The next and favorite thing people bring up is fuel credits. Fuel credits are system to reward companies that do good in terms of following regulations and punishes companies that are bad. This is not money from the government, this is money from car companies that pollute more then they are should. Again, these are the universal rules of the market. This rule was not designed for Tesla or with any intention of promoting Tesla. These are just the laws the car market operates under.
We can have a discussion if fuel credits are the best policy tools for government to use. But fundamentally are you gone disagree with the concept that governments should have fuel standards give intensives to companies to do the right thing? Outside of climate crisis, local pollution alone make this a sensible policy.
These fuel credits did net Tesla a few billion but do yourself a favor and go look threw Tesla financial history, you can exclude fuel credits income from its whole history. Then do some graphs on Tesla financials and their growth and margin curves. Then add the fuel credits, then compare the graphes.
Anybody that claims that Tesla is only successful because of government action is just deluding themselves. Everybody who actually studied the financials of Tesla had figured out by 2014 that while Credits were nice little revenue boost, those that focused on credit were missing the woods because of the trees.
> And surprisingly even on HN and reddit people have fallen for the scam.
The scam of a company making 3+ billion $ a quarter at 15% operating margin. Yeah what a scam you must feel so smart.
buildings teams is part of my day job, Musk's ability to get the right people in the right spot at the right time and motivated is his biggest gift IMO. If you're good at that then there's really nothing you can't actually do.
Elon contributed the "what if we landed the rocket?" moonshot ambition. Definitely need both.
Musk's contributions can pretty much be summed up by "already had a lot of money" and "hired smart people". Contrast w/ the founding of Microsoft or Apple, in which the founders were the actual people creating their first products from scratch.
Musk is certainly a big-idea person, but I think he is a prime example of somebody who was in the right place to get lucky at the top of the dotcom boom, which in turn rested on him being from an already wealthy family. His foray into Twitter, "how to solve the Ukraine-Russia war", and the Thai cave rescue suggest he's not quite the genius his fans make him out to be.
He almost went bankrupt getting their first small rocket to space. He wasn't exactly poor at the time thanks to paypal, but he didn't have anything close to unlimited funds. He is a billionaire now because he succeeded, not the other way around.
> [..] which the founders were the actual people creating their first products from scratch.
If your claim is that Elon was not involved in creating the products, this is misinformed. https://old.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/k1e0ta/eviden... is the link I have handy.
> which in turn rested on him being from an already wealthy family.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1005593651219582977, "I arrived in North America at 17 w $2000, a backpack & a suitcase full of books. Paid my own way thru college. Dropped out of Stanford Eng/Phys grad school w $110k in college debt."
> Thai cave rescue
The "pedo"-thing was stupid and deserve criticism, but he was actually asked to continue working on the submarine: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1016684366083190785
Of course. But he was the first person to make it work, which was very non-trivial. NASA failed at it for 60 years.
From sratch? I don't think so. DOS was bought from Tim Patterson. Microsoft BASIC ran on a computer created by others. Microsoft didn't invent BASIC. Neither did Apple. Apple didn't invent the 6502. The Apple 1 was built from off-the-shelf parts available to anyone.
Being a genius does not require being a success at everything. In fact, most successful people fail quite a lot. The difference between successful people and unsuccessful ones is the successful ones:
1. are not dissuaded by failure
2. learn from their mistakes and failures
3. try again and again
The unsuccessful ones "learn" from their failure by not trying again. Or they quit before they start.
Of course all the early people, Shotwell, Mueller, Königsmann, Bazza were all really important. Shotwell by now being the the most important.
But there really is no question that Musk deserves by far the most credit.
>And, uh, I’ve seen that hurt us before, I’ve seen that fail, but I’ve also seen— where nobody thought it would work— it was the right decision. It was the harder way to do it, but in the end, it was the right thing. One of the things that we did with the Merlin 1D was; he kept complaining— I talked earlier about how expensive the engine was. [inaudible] [I said,] “[the] only way is to get rid of all these valves. Because that’s what’s really driving the complexity and cost.” And how can you do that? And I said, “Well, on smaller engines, we’d go face-shutoff, but nobody’s done it on a really large engine. It’ll be really difficult.” And he said, “We need to do face-shutoff. Explain how that works?” So I drew it up, did some, you know, sketches, and said “here’s what we’d do,” and he said “That’s what we need to do.” And I advised him against it; I said it’s going to be too hard to do, and it’s not going to save that much. But he made the decision that we were going to do face-shutoff.
>So we went and developed that engine; and it was hard. We blew up a lot of hardware. And we tried probably tried a hundred different combinations to make it work; but we made it work. I still have the original sketch I did; I think it was— what was it, Christmas 2011, when I did that sketch? And it’s changed quite a bit from that original sketch, but it was pretty scary for me, knowing how that hardware worked, but by going face-shutoff, we got rid of the main valves, we got rid of the sequencing computer; basically, you spin the pumps and pressure comes up, the pressure opens the main injector, lets the oxygen go first, and then the fuel comes in. So all you gotta time is the ignitor fluid. So if you have the ignitor fluid going, it’ll light, and it’s not going to hard start. That got rid of the problem we had where you have two valves; the oxygen valve and the fuel valve. The oxygen valve is very cold and very stiff; it doesn’t want to move. And it’s the one you want open first. If you relieve the fuel, it’s what’s called a hard start. In fact, we have an old saying that says, “[inaudible][When you start a rocket engine, a thousand things could happen, and only one of those is good]“, and by having sequencing correctly, you can get rid of about 900 of those bad things, we made these engine very reliable, got rid of a lot of mass, and got rid of a lot of costs. And it was the right thing to do.
>And now we have the lowest-cost, most reliable engines in the world. And it was basically because of that decision, to go to do that. So that’s one of the examples of Elon just really pushing— he always says we need to push to the limits of physics. Like, an example I’ll give is, on the car factory; you know, a car moves through a typical factory, like a Toyota or a Chevy factory; a car is moving at you know, inches per second. It’s like, much less than walking speed. And his thoughts are that the machinery, the robots that are building the car should move as fast as they can. They should be moving so fast you can’t see them. That’s why you can’t have people in there, because they’d get crushed; people move too slow. That’s the way he thinks. “So, what are the physical limits of how fast you can make a car?” He looks at videos of like, coke cans being made, and things like that, where you can’t even see them; it’s just a blur. And, you know, the puck of aluminum, cut it up, deep-draw, fill it with coke, you put the lid on, you put the lid on it; it’s just like going down the assembly line so fast you can’t even see it. And Elon wants to do that with cars.
People often claim SpaceX was just Musk's show rather than a team effort where Mueller and Shotwell at least were just as important and probably more people besides. And he's had his share of bad ideas. But at the same time the sort of restless perfectionism he tries to get people to have in their engineering is a net force for good, similar to what Steve Jobs did with design at Apple.
Any other exec would have pulled the plug. For example, in 2017 Blue Origin blew up an engine and test stand. Bezos freaked out, fired the CEO and brought in an oldspace stooge who has basically killed the company.
It's when things get tough that you find out what leaders are made of. SpaceX and Tesla have gone through some really tough times.
> insufferable megalomaniac
Nah. He's arrogant, to be sure, but nobody would attempt SpaceX or Tesla without being arrogant. It's a feature, not a bug.
> I don't think his goals at twitter are long term profitability or a healthier American society/democracy
Do you really think he spent $44B on Twitter to lose money on purpose?
To the last point: Yes, I think he could. When you have $150,000,000,000, even losing $149,000,000,000 would leave you with $1,000,000,000, which is hundreds and hundreds of times the lifetime net worth of most Americans.
Meaning yes, I can completely imagine someone with his money spending a lot of money to have major influence over how the world communicates. Bloomberg spent a billion dollars of his own money trying to be president and he's still quite rich.
The Clintons made around $100 million for being President. The Clinton Foundation is worth $300b, and is largely used to fund the Clintons. Obama is worth $70 million. Trump initially viewed his run for office as publicity stunt for his businesses. He was obviously surprised that he won.
Being President is very, very lucrative.
> FWIW Tesla literally did exist before he was involved
I know. And without Musk nobody would have ever heard of it.
[1] https://www.clintonfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/11...
Shotwell runs certain parts of the business day to day. Elon heads up new projects whereas daily operations goes to Shotwell, which makes sense given her position of Chief Operating Officer. For example, by her own words, she has little involvement in the Starship project, or didn't as of early 2021 when asked about it.
Also there's extra incentive to tear down anyone with multiple successes, as they're a constant reminder that success isn't all due to luck.
this is the crux of it.
If he isn't just lucky, than that pushes one's own perils from misfortune to the realm of a lack of self-actualization and agency.
Hard work makes you much more lucky, and that oxymoron is a hard pill for the "unfortunate" masses to swallow.
No one wants to admit to not working hard; they want to push the responsibility to (mis)fortune.
But his success isn't all due to skill, either. Someone with the same brain and no seed money from Daddy would have been far less successful.
> "We were very wealthy. We had so much money at times we couldn’t even close our safe,” [said Elon's father] adding that one person would have to hold the money in place with another closing the door. “And then there’d still be all these notes sticking out and we’d sort of pull them out and put them in our pockets.”
> More background: I arrived in North America at 17 w $2000, a backpack & a suitcase full of books. Paid my own way thru college. Dropped out of Stanford Eng/Phys grad school w $110k in college debt.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1211064937004589056
> We started Zip2 with ~$2k from me plus my overclocked home-built PC, ~$5k from my bro & ~$8k from Greg Kouri (such a good guy — he is greatly missed).
> My Dad provided 10% of a ~$200k angel funding round much later, but by then risk was reduced & round would’ve happened anyway.
Edit: For example, while he did work on a farm to pay for college that farm was owned by his Mom's cousin. Working for family is generally a significant advantage.
Edit2: Having a wealthy childhood has enduring benefits even if the money doesn't last. For example, it significantly increased his chance of having access to a computer at age 12, which probably had an enduring impact on his coding skills.
I'm not saying that means he didn't work hard and isn't smart. I am saying that it's telling he thinks that kind of thing didn't also contribute.
I don't see why you think that this is what he thinks? It's certainly not what I think. What he is doing is answering persistent claims going too far the other way; that his success is only because of seed money from his father.
Or, as you say seemingly somewhat derogatory, "daddy". Their relationship wasn't always that great as far as I understand it, but I don't know the details.
1. If someone has wealthy family members this tends to benefit them, and they tend not to realize it.
2. Growing up wealthy didn't guarantee Musk's success, but it made it easier than it would have been if he grew up poorer. This happens in ways that are hard for someone like him to realize. For example, he might not realize that if he'd grown up worrying about money there's a significant chance his brain would have noticably changed in a way that made it harder for him to function.
> His success isn't all due to luck, he has genuine skills. ... But his success isn't all due to skill, either.
(The space shuttle had to be essentially rebuilt after every mission, the boosters were thrown away, the concept was a dead-end from the start.)
E.g., NASA cannot build a major program with an assembly line mentality. The need to spread their work out across multiple constituencies to ensure continued support. Ever wonder why major NASA centers are in key political states like Florida, California, Texas, and Ohio?
Also, when they lose govt payloads, the govt (i.e. taxpayers) shoulder most of the risk because they are self-insured. That means SpaceX gets to take bigger risks because they don't have to pay for them through the typical privatized mechanisms of risk mitigation like insurance.
>Downvote; go learn.
You might benefit from learning a bit from the HN Guidelines regarding discourse.
Yes, I might :) . Just went with existing practice, not with guidelines. Will try to do better next time :) .
> Except Musk himself has said they were hours away from bankruptcy before NASA's contract had come through after that fourth launch.
That's exactly what I'm talking about. I think you're proving my point - your "Unless you're Musk, who gets the taxpayers to fund his risk. What's the saying? It's socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor?" says that Musk didn't risk his own money developing Falcon-1, and almost lost.
Remember Falcon-5? That was SpaceX approach to relatively slowly conquering the market in case NASA won't give them contracts. But NASA did, and Falcon-5 went to history, and Falcon-9 got full steam ahead.
> Also, when they lose govt payloads, the govt (i.e. taxpayers) shoulder most of the risk because they are self-insured. That means SpaceX gets to take bigger risks because they don't have to pay for them through the typical privatized mechanisms of risk mitigation like insurance.
SpaceX happily serves commercial customers. And commercial customers are happily served by SpaceX. And US government wants its own share of cheap and reliable - comparatively - launches, so SpaceX gets their orders too. Will you say anybody dealing with US government rides on the backs of taxpayers?
Do you understand that you're wrong with your socialism and capitalism?
I have no qualms with the hybrid govt/contractor approach. I've said elsewhere on this thread that I think both sides can benefit from it. But, to a certain extent, I'm saying that limits Musk's claims to great business acumen, at least outside of relying on large govt contracts. To a certain extent, many on this thread have said that constitutes a type of grift. A grift that requires taxpayer money. I'm playing a little loose with the socialism definition, for sure, but that's the larger point.
To that point, there would be no SpaceX without govt funding. One of the reasons they now have commercial customers is because the NASA contracts allowed them to get better to a point where private customers saw them as a viable option. If they didn't have that opportunity with NASA, I don't think they'd have private customers. For one, they likely wouldn't have enough early private customers to be economically viable. And two, those early flights would be much more expensive because they were unproven and that uncertainty makes insuring those flights much more expensive if not impossible. To that extent, a viable SpaceX business model is completely predicated on government contracts and not on private sector capitalism. The govt split the CCP contract to try and spread risk across multiple vendors and essentially fund an upstart in the hope that it pays off.
It's paying off so far, so I'm not saying that's all bad. But it does make their model divorced from a purely capitalistic endeavor. I'm not saying Musk had no skin in the game, but I am saying he had almost nil chance of winning that game without taxpayer support. Other people on this thread have pointed out how that distinction matters when comparing to better examples of business leaders.
>Will you say anybody dealing with US government rides on the backs of taxpayers?
I would say if the business model is only viable with government contracts and is particularly viable because it forces taxpayers to shoulder the early risk, yes. I'm glad SpaceX is able to move away from that, but let's not revise history to ignore those early facts because they don't fit our preferred narrative of Musk being a clever paragon of capitalism.
> there would be no SpaceX without govt funding
Strictly speaking, historically things evolved one particular way, and we don't know exactly what would happen if something have changed in the past. Here you state your opinion, and I'd say yes, SpaceX used US govt money, but that doesn't mean they couldn't grow without them. They already had an orbital launch on private money - a significant achievement by itself - and there were plans to grow without NASA, which - in my opinion - were reasonable. So I'm skeptical about their guaranteed death without support from US govt money.
> But it does make their model divorced from a purely capitalistic endeavor.
Maybe you mean some rather theoretical, simple pure market model. In reality US govt supports growing industries - Internet is an example - so this is at least rather traditional.
> I am saying he had almost nil chance of winning that game without taxpayer support
This is an opinion. Here is what I know: there is a community, called alt-space (from a Usenet section), or New Space, which basically talked about what SpaceX was doing about a decade before SpaceX. It was a matter of time who'd get this done successfully first. An example of this New Space approach would be Northrop Grumman Lunal Lander Challenge, where John Carmack's Armadillo Aerospace showed a lot of impressive technology, and which was eventually won by Masten Space - all of that with reusable rocket technology, landing under power, years before SpaceX made first stages of Falcon-9 reusable. Because of this I think that Elon's stated approach of developing more modest, but cheaper rockets - like Falcon-5 (while continuing flying Falcon-1) - or partnering with Virgin Galactic on droppable launcher - relying only on private market could actually work.
> but I am saying he had almost nil chance of winning that game without taxpayer support.
Beal Aerospace "folded" a few years before SpaceX; now people have doubt if he did the right thing, given that his technology was perhaps even cheaper than SpaceX. NASA also learned a lesson from Beal closing the doors, and was more careful to the next entrant. The final result, by today, is rather good, by popular opinion, I would say - NASA got a good launch supplier, SpaceX got a good anchor customer, so US govt would likely lose if it didn't support SpaceX, and relying on that support was a good approach. Yet even without that support there is no guarantee SpaceX wouldn't succeed; there are some arguments for that.
> if the business model is only viable with government contracts and is particularly viable because it forces taxpayers to shoulder the early risk, yes.
SpaceX brought significant savings to US govt, so that risk - from US point of view - was rather justified. Remember, US govt can't work with only zero-risk schemes, and in such a complex area as space access it has to tolerate some risk, even with existing providers.
> If your business only works by being propped up by the govt
There is no proof that SpaceX couldn't work without govt help. Also govt help brought taxpayers savings - in exchange for some risk, which is not obviously comparable to existing non-zero risk elsewhere.
> it's a bastardized form of socialism.
I doubt many on HN will agree with you.
> but let's not revise history to ignore those early facts
I want to emphasize - if the history would repeat, those choices made would better be repeated. Even if SpaceX lost, US govt would be better keeping betting on new companies for the launch services, because alternatives are likely worse. In this sense SpaceX is a lucky opportunity for US.
> because they don't fit our preferred narrative of Musk being a clever paragon of capitalism.
For long time rocket startups assumed one of their customers - perhaps biggest, or the only one - would be US govt, because the US govt doesn't historically have that much of a choice. If we'd have many SpaceX-es, then, yes, a new company could worry that they could not be chosen by US govt for contracts, because their competitors are that much better - but even now it's not the case. In this sense, because Musk knew all too well US govt will need his resources he doesn't stop being "a clever paragon of capitalism".
> The simplest way of framing it is saying, "If they required taxpayer money in order to become/remain viable, it's a form of socialist intervention." I would put a lot of other companies in that list, from automotive to finance, so I'm not just picking on SpaceX.
Since this is how things work, I wouldn't even argue. I'd just say that's how things work. If you wish they'd better work differently, you'll have to provide arguments why that different way will actually be better.
>This is an opinion.
>There is no proof that SpaceX couldn't work without govt help.
These are all refuted by Musk's own words. He literally said NASA bailed him out when they were so close to failure he thought he might have a mental breakdown. The irony is that your push against that seems to be your own opinion, that goes against his. I am also aware of the previous work with similar ideas, including others that you didn't mention. Yes, the ideas existed. However, there wasn't the right climate or the right timing to execute it. Hell, govt essentially subsidizing flight goes back to the Wright brothers competing for military contracts. In a sense, that's what changed the pursuit from hobbyists to professionals. I give all the credit to Musk for capitalizing on that when the timing was right. But that is conflating good business timing that secures govt support with being a good capitalist businessman, irrespective of govt support.
As to whether the govt is better off, I agree. I've already said that much in this discussion and elsewhere on the thread. But the same applies to when the govt bailed out GM to save a major manufacturing supply chain, or bailing out the financial sector during the housing crises. This feels very much like a strawman. I'm simply pointing out they benefit from a form of socialized risk; I'm not saying the effects of socialist policies are inherently bad.
So, to your statement about this is just how things work, I generally agree there as well. What I disagree on is when people pretend it's not so in order to justify a fairy tale of capitalistic virtue. I don't think it's wrong for the govt to support businesses like this; if you recall, my original post was simply refuting the framing of the problem as a false dichotomy between NASA and SpaceX while failing to recognize that the differences are actually part of the intent, not the result of some boondoggle.
I do think you may have had a knee-jerk reaction to my initial comment, which is understandable given the amount of Elon hate. Maybe if you re-read it with a critical eye and some emotional distance, you'll interpret it differently. It seems like the only part we really disagree on is the viability of SpaceX without govt support early. Sure, maybe there's a chance they would have still succeeded, but given Musk's own words on the matter, I highly doubt it. And I'm pretty happy they've done well.
We disagree in interpretation of Musk's words - indeed, I never heard him saying that he would certainly close SpaceX if NASA funding wouldn't materialize.
That’s because the fourth launch succeeded, reportedly due to engineers changing a single line of code to fix a problem from the third attempt. The success helped SpaceX land a commercial contract with NASA valued at roughly $1.6 billion, extending the young company a lifeline."[1]
“NASA called and told us we won a $1.5 billion contract,” Musk can be heard saying in the clip. “I couldn't even hold the phone. I just blurted out, 'I love you guys!’" Pelley asks in the clip, "They saved you," Yeah, they did,” Musk is heard saying. He describes that he had “virtually no money, a fourth failure would have been absolutely game over. Done.” [2]
Musk deserves credit for avoiding that 4th failure, but that's not the same as saying the business was viable without govt support. That's where I think you're initial response is off the mark. To your earlier points, though, I think this is where the hybrid model excels. The govt, due to it's size, can take on a disproportionate risk to help nascent companies/technologies. But let's not lose sight of the fact that many of these success stories are predicated on socializing that risk to the taxpayer early on.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/11/30/elon-musk-warning-not-first-...
[2] https://www.republicworld.com/technology-news/science/nasa-2...
You can't seem to understand that NASA offer is not the same as closing the company without it. While NASA offer was nice, I never heard Musk saying certainly that without that offer - after Falcon-1 flew successfully - SpaceX would close.
Government takes risk just like commercial companies take risk. Nothing unusial here. Taking such risk means that some ventures will fail, but overall it will get better than without taking risk.
>Government takes risk just like commercial companies take risk.
Incorrect. Govt payloads are self-insured. This is essentially saying "We have such deep pockets that it doesn't matter if we lose the payload, it won't hurt us financially." I don't know many private organizations with that risk threshold. This is partly why the early govt contract is so important. It allows SpaceX to get enough experience while being funded by a customer that isn't risk-adverse. This buys them time to improve to a point where commercial payloads can be insured without being cost-prohibitive. Again to my original point, this means the govt shoulders a disproportionate amount of risk.
I guess when the CEO says "Yep, they saved us. Without that contract, we'd be done because we were out of money" and that isn't clear enough, you've transitioned to fanboy-dom. Cognitive dissonance is a hell of a hurdle.
This could be argued about :) as e.g. NASA beat Soviets in the Moon Race by behaving central-planning, while Soviets tried to grow local market competition (Korolyov, Chelomey, Yangel).
Remember "Field of Dreams"? "Build it and they will come?" That's typical hollywood bullshit advice. You've got to proactively market something, i.e. make your own luck.
Apparently you don't. Costner's character heard a voice saying, "Build it and he will come", referring to his father. So you took this as personal advice, albeit "bullsh!t" advice. More power to you ...
Or you know - maybe he is that amazing, I doubt it, but Trump did invent the MRNA vaccines all by himself as well, so...
Here he thanks Tom Mueller: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1333544636137283586
Here he thanks some Tesla club members: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1211836235762880512
Here he thanks NASA for all the support over the years, "without which this would not have happened": https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1219127317957615617
Here he says that "Gwynne is the best": https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1538400836669296640
That's just a random collection I found with a couple of quick google searches.
If you have actually watched for example the starbase tours with Elon, it's difficult to claim that he isn't "involved": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t705r8ICkRw
Sidenote, all but a few of his twitter mentions of Shotwell are responses to mentions of her and it seems like he's injecting himself into the discussion.
So there must be some difference between them on this point.
There just doesn't seem to be a correlation between success in some narrow domain like engineering, business, art, or music and being a good human being in general.
I also wonder if there's a causative factor. When someone becomes super successful they tend to get surrounded by people telling them what a genius they are. That can definitely distort someone's self image. Could you stay balanced if millions of people compared you to a comic book superhero for years and loads of people did whatever you said because you had tons of money? Now throw in tons of stress and quite possibly a good helping of loneliness due to the difficulty all this creates with forming real deep relationships with others.
I don't see any particular correlation with being a bad human, either. Look hard enough at anyone and you'll find feet of clay.
Success in their domains greatly outshine the clay.
And Tesla is a famously consumer-hostile company. We don't need more success like that. SpaceX is a much better example, and a lot of that can be attributed to how well he delegated leadership to someone competent.
Now he's waded into one of the most difficult lines of business and we'll find out in the next couple of years whether he's just been lucky and well-funded, or if he really is a business genius.
The Tesla owners I know are all happy with their Teslas.
> whether he's just been lucky
Being successful once might be luck. Being successful twice looks like business acumen. Being successful 3 times is business genius.
Bill Gates was successful 3 times, so was Steve Jobs.
Being successful in two unrelated industries, rockets and cars, is very very unusual. The number of successful new car manufacturers from scratch in the last 100 years or so is about zero (Delorean, Tucker, Bricklin, etc.) which makes Tesla all the more impressive.
> Now he's waded into one of the most difficult lines of business
Harder than car manufacturing or making rockets? Twitter is nothing compared to that.
It's a good thing the natural laws of Newtonian physics also covers content moderation. /s
I was happy enough. I won't buy another. There's another data point for you.
But putting aside anecdotes, I'm talking about things we know Tesla has done. Like taking away battery capacity (with no compensation) for existing owners in order to reduce liability risk for the company. Or how about deciding to take away features from individual customers because they've determined that customer should never have had the feature? Something that costs Tesla nothing but is a great big middle finger to their customers.
Anyone who buys a Tesla knowing their record of screwing over their own customers is foolish.
> Harder than car manufacturing or making rockets? Twitter is nothing compared to that.
It's worse. Much worse. With sufficient cash I can go hire an incredible amount of expertise building both cars and rockets. Rocketry in particular is an engineering problem. Twitter is a human nature problem. Good luck with that. And especially Elon, who has questionable social skills to begin with.
Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson are pretty good arguments against this.
Take a look at the growing graveyard of failed small launch startups. Sure, rockets are mostly just engineering these days, but it is still very difficult engineering.
SpaceX was the also first to reuse an orbital rocket booster. They have now done so 150 times. It's hard to understate how big of a deal this is, to not throw away your rocket every time you launch it. And they are on the cusp of a fully reusable rocket with Starship.
Elon Musk is an arrogant asshole, at the least. But you are really downplaying the accomplishments of SpaceX.
Those are tiny examples that only applied to a really small number of users. Hardly some grand plans of fraud.
More relevant things would be FSD not being transferable, at least while its in Beta. That is actually user hostile.
I mean, is there any direction besides down that it is possible for Elon to punch?
How regularly? Examples aside from "pedo guy"? Which I think all, including himself, would agree was a punch down.
> Tesla is a famously consumer-hostile company.
It seems to me that being a technology company in addition to being a car company, Tesla's buyers are more likely than other brands' buyers to complain on the internet. And every supposed journalist knows that a Tesla hit piece will garner clicks.
Initially, Consumer Reports seemed to really like Tesla. But much more recently, they have not generally rated Tesla comparable to other cars. They only have one model (the Model 3) that even scored average.
One of their issues is that they like to move fast in their designs. Changing sensors, suppliers, components etc. means it's really hard to nail reliability and quality. As the saying goes...move fast and, well...break things.
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/17/cars/tesla-consumer-reports-d...
In any case, by consumer hostile I mean: Tesla will turn features off on your car if it believes you are not entitled to them. Sometimes years later. They may cut your battery range significantly because it presents a fire risk, without ever 1) asking, 2) compensating you, or 2) fixing the battery. They may turn off the radar you bought with your car. They take liberties with the OTA updates that warn me away from wanting to buy another Tesla. Fortunately the competition in the EV space has gotten really good in the last couple years and is accelerating.
He was punching up plenty. He has always been combative and would respond 2x to each perceived insult. He sued DoD and NASA. He went after the large car companies. He went after Bezos when Bezos was pretending BlueOrigin is even remotely in the same league as SpaceX.
But at this point, there is not many place to punch but down.
I'm also not a fan of twitter thing and its certainty a part of his character that is not flattering.
Elon recently 'punched up' against Hillary Clinton (only using the word 'punch' because of context here; actually it was a gentle questioning of a propagandistic line she was trying to push). I've also seen him lightly mock Joe Biden.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1587894226695884800
It's darned good marketing. Simple and effective.
SpaceX build one engine per day while the competition is building one every 91 days. They're landing and re-using rockets every single week. They're taking humans into space.
Tesla build cars that have one basically every award there is. They're are basically the safest cars on the road. They outsell other EVs enormously.
There is no marketing it any of that, it's simply all facts.
I'd almost be inclined to suspect that Musk says (privately, to his closest confidants) that he's had very few successes and a great many failures.
Now, on the other hand, if one wanted to say that his public persona is often that of a pompous windbag, I'd be hard-pressed to disagree, though I'd hasten to add that (unfortunate as it might be) one almost has to be a pompous windbag in public to get far in business in contemporary culture. We live in the Era of Outrage, after all; "number of people pissed off" might as well be currency.
I was there when Bill Gates would attract similar hate. Jeff Bezos is only lucky that there isn't much of public facing information on Bezos, like Bezos speeches or Bezos is not known to routinely give out success advice on commonly accessible media.
Elon Musk is a highly successful immigrant entrepreneur, built several companies, some of them happen to be some of the hardest businesses ever to win in. Has a very powerful social media presence, he announces his intentions often, which many feel are impossible, but he wins nevertheless. He also is also very good in social culture scene too, which many people find cool. He is what most people want to be, but can't for various (at times valid)reasons.
Being a counter thesis to your (at times valid)excuses is bound to attract some resentment and hate.
I wish my businesses "failed" like Tesla and SpaceX!