Again, you can grant that Elon is a super genius, and it doesn't impact the moral dimension.

That's exactly the kind of people who were making the decisions all along (public health officials and laptop-class academics).

I don't understand the point you're making.

Musk was correct that COVID was wildly overblown and similar to flu. Fauci himself said it was flu-like back in March 2020 iirc, because it was. Musk is meanwhile highly accountable; people can just not buy stuff from him. You can't get public health officials out of your life that easily.

At the height of covid cases, hospitals were nearing their capacity, some did and had to declare major incidents rerouting patients to other nearby hospitals which were also nearing their capacity...

Even if the death toll from covid would have been ZERO for every infected person, assuming they were able to get a hospital bed, without lockdowns reducing the transmission, we would have ran out of hospital beds. Ambulances would have been sat outside the hospitals unable to unload their patient's. At this stage all elective/emergency surgery would have stopped. The 999 operators would have been swamped which wouldn't matter anyway because there is nothing they can do as all the ambulances are stuck. Imagine calling for an ambulance after a car crash, or for a family member after a household accident, not only do you not get one but the hospital wont accept a patient if you drop them off.

Elon is no doubt highly intelligent, he would have known this.. He also would have known that if he kicked up enough of a fuss, and sent his own employees in, this would have little effect on the overall hospital bed status and he could avoid fines by threatening to take his business elsewhere or just pay them and still make a profit by having the factory open.

How many were at the hospital purely out of an abundance of media-stoked and politician-stoked fear, and would have recovered just fine had they stayed home and waited it out like they would have for any other cold?

We know that there was massive overreaction and unjustifiable paranoia exhibited by many people and organizations to pretty much all aspects of this situation, and this went on for over two years in some cases.

It's not unreasonable to expect the same irrationality to have affected the medical community and the decisions they were making.

Even before mid-2020, it was clear to any rational observer that the situation was severely overblown, and there was a lot of completely nonsensical behaviour taking place for no good reason at all.

The main reason this foolishness went on for years was because of the overt censorship and demonization we saw of those who were merely taking a rational look at the situation and expressing how irrationally others were behaving.

You're accusing other people of being paranoid, while wildly downplaying the severity of COVID. Every reaction must seem like a paranoid overreaction from the perspective that it's "just a cold," but the cold does not have a 1% mortality rate (as we were seeing at the time).

I remain baffled by how some people will look at someone fighting for their life on a respirator and say, "wow, what a weak, entitled person, coming to the hospital for life saving care when they could recover from sheer force of will in the privacy of their own home."

Let's look at the situation in the Toronto area, for example. Remember, greater Toronto is Canada's most populous region, and the seventh-most populous metropolitan area in North America.

We know that the counting of deaths was done very questionably. Toronto Public Health itself admitted that as early as June of 2020:

"Individuals who have died with COVID-19, but not as a result of COVID-19 are included in the case counts for COVID-19 deaths in Toronto."

https://twitter.com/TOPublicHealth/status/127588839006028596...

Later on, we saw news reports like this one:

"Patients died from neglect, not COVID-19, in Ontario LTC homes, military report finds: ‘All they needed was water and a wipe down’"

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-canadian-mili...

We should also consider the role of ventilator-associated lung injury and ventilator-induced lung injury, as well.

We also saw news reports like this:

"Hamilton Health Sciences takes down field hospital that didn't see a single COVID-19 patient"

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/hamilton/hhs-field-hospital-c...

Like I'd mentioned earlier, there was severe overreaction displayed by many people and organizations, and it resulted in irrational behaviour.

That one field hospital didn't see a single COVID-19 patient could have a lot of reasons for example, patients went to another one.

From my experience, people around me who got COVID suffered and/or died. Others had mild symptoms. You are either lucky or your were not. :(

https://covid19-sciencetable.ca/sciencebrief/excess-mortalit...

They also advise that the actual number of deaths from covid-19 is higher than reported. Regardless, deaths were curtailed due to the measures in place. without these measures, once hospitals reach critical capacity, deaths would sky rocket, not just from covid but all sources.

> Later on, we saw news reports like this one: > "Patients died from neglect, not COVID-19, in Ontario LTC homes, military report finds: ‘All they needed was water and a wipe down’"

This report is about two care homes in Ontario, it is not representative of the millions who died.

> We also saw news reports like this: > "Hamilton Health Sciences takes down field hospital that didn't see a single COVID-19 patient"

Tents setup on playgrounds were never the first line of defence, they were a contingency for other measures which worked. without the measures you're arguing against, those tents would have been very much used.

> Like I'd mentioned earlier, there was severe overreaction displayed by many people and organizations, and it resulted in irrational behaviour.

You keep asserting that, I don't agree.

Hospitals in the UK go near or exceed their capacity in any flu season, it happened many times before 2020 and is due primarily to badly managed nationalized health and social care where supply/demand aren't joined up. This doesn't mean anything was wrong with Elon's position.

i’m not so sure this is because of socialized medicine considering how often american hospitals run into capacity issues and the general state of wreckage that is US health care—which by the way is a significant amount the most expensive per citizen in the world.

Primarily due to badly managed privately held, for-profit care where supply and demand aren't joined up. (because it's a hospital and avoiding death is inelastic).

But we do know that states with more lockdowns had lower excess deaths. So in the aggregate we know that lockdowns saved lives.

I try to separate the visionary tech genius side of him from the public crap that he’s done to ruin his public image. He has achieved the impossible so many times that he’s developed a god complex. I can’t speak to the electric car part but I’m impressed that he was able to will the country into caring about electric cars. He literally reinvented the space industry and made it cool again. But personally he’s a shit show that has gone unchecked for too long.

When it comes to Twitter I doubt his magic is going to carry over to running a social media company. His style works because of the culture he’s able to build and the vision that he’s able to sell. From what I can tell he’s ruining the good parts of the Twitter culture and he doesn’t have a vision. Good luck to anyone working there. The years that I spent a working at spacex were the best years of my life that I’d never want to repeat again.

I observe that Musk’s biggest wins is where he has used his enthusiasm and large cachet of celebrity capital to challenge the status quo. Tesla and SpaceX both embody elements of society that sci-fi has been dreaming since we were kids. Self landing rockets flying all the time! Electric robot cars that drive themselves! He challenges entrenched industries to do a thing that people wish they would do, but the bean counters say isn’t worth it. It least that’s how the fanciful narrative goes.

The problem with Twitter (or any social network/super app) is that it is not clear what that “go big, go beyond, dream big” trajectory is. For me personally, it’d be about open source, open walls, federation, and above all no fricking advertisement/surveillance economy. I don’t see how Musk’s acquisition here achieves that or any other “dream for the stars” aspiration one has for Twitter.

And His dream for the stars aspiration for Twitter is a public square where people exchange communication and ideas freely, civilly and honestly. Some might argue that is a crazier dream than autonomous rockets, Mars and electric cars!

That is his really great talent: getting smart people to put their resources behind ambitious projects. That was also Elizabeth Holmes's talent, and Adam Neumann's. So far, he has done well at pivoting that inspiring message to real results, unlike the other two.

Cargill to Ikea

For example, Walmart has 560B+ revenue per year and a market cap of 380B.

Several big law firms are likely worth over $100 billion if they ever were equity financed, but use a partnership structure for legal reasons. The same for large hedge funds, which use partnerships for tax reasons.

This list has some more traditional companies that have stayed private but have high revenue:

https://www.forbes.com/largest-private-companies/list/

Some of them would crack $100 billion valuation, but not all (eg Publix at #3 on the list probably wouldn't, but Mars at #4 would).

Here's a worldwide list with the same caveat:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_private_non-...

These lists only include companies that report their revenue for one reason or another (eg to get a loan). Many profitable private companies don't - their owners like to stay private and extract cash from the business rather than having to keep the profit in the business.

State-owned companies are another group entirely, and are often worth a ton.

Things are not worth doing simply because they are risky - that's just more fetishism. They are worth doing because they solve problems. Space travel has the potential to solve certain problems, and is already solving lots of problems today. Mars colonization is not a serious proposal to any problem, because it can't be accomplished on any time horizon we're planning for. Mars colonization will likely never happen, and if it does, it is far beyond the foreseeable future (>100 years).

So; SpaceX's rockets (and satellites) could certainly be useful, and are certainly useful today, but as GP pointed out, Musk's stated purpose is nonsense.

Feel free to sit down and do nothing. While others do something.

Why do you feel entitled to dictate how other people must spend their time and resources, even to fail.

At the scale of indicuals I would agree people should be free to try whatever hairbrained schemes they please, at that scale who am I to say what will work out or won't or what success even means.

What concerns me is that so many people are buying into false solutions and transparent grift about real and pressing issues that impact us all collectively. Musk isn't a crackpot who should be tolerated in the interests of liberty, he's a public figure who is actively causing harm, and I believe will cause more in the future. So I'm certainly entitled to share my views on this public figure, and I'll continue to do so. I'm curious why you would respond to that so defensively.

Because

I think I shouldn't do X. == ok

I think You shouldn't do X. == no

I think you should get all the rights to not start a rocket company, car company, a tunnel boring company, solar panel company. But you demanding others not start all those companies seems to be wrong to me.

Again, I give you all the rights do sit down and do nothing.

The freedom you seem to be advocating for is freedom from other people having opinions, existing, or speaking to you. As if they only mattered when they agreed with you or were willing to help you, and they became irrelevant the moment they had a criticism. I think you should reconsider. I think life is better with vigorous debate with people you disagree with, and that the things you so badly want to "get done" will be richer and deeper if you engage with people who may not like what you're doing. Otherwise, how could there be any other outcome than finding yourself surrounded by yes men?

The strongest argument is Tesla still doesn't have self-driving cars considering he's given it tons of attention for years and missed ETAs many times, but they're clearly getting there.

That said, while I do think space travel is crazy cool, the prospects of living on Mars are quite long-term and a _lot_ of work to the point you might ask if it's really worth it worrying about it right now. How are they going to solve the atmosphere? Or even more impossible, how are they going to solve the ionizing radiation from space? I guess they could just live in closed-off domes but still...

you can read this sentence and come away with the conclusion that he doesn't do anything, or that he is responsible for everything. To me, it mostly seems like he has a bunch of money / financing so he can pay people to try lots of often very dumb ideas and some might work. His core "skill" being an accumulation of immense wealth.

you might say "you need both ideas and execution, and he is an ideas guy", which is correct, but i think the level of credit (and compensation) is wildly skewed towards the "ideas guy" in this case

Jobs was viewed as the idea guy when he went back to apple, and it wouldn't have been really different if that was his first time there instead of returning.

Their impact on the Roadster is debatable. Their impact on Tesla, as a whole, is effectively zero.

You say his core skill is accumulating wealth but that’s a reductive way of looking at the world. His core skill is his ability to sell you on his ideas. He sold the world on electric cars and he sold the best rocket scientists and engineers on his space ambitions. He’s a tremendous leader and you’d be foolish to underestimate him.

Again, I don’t fanboy him but I do give credit where credit is due. I worked there and I even briefly worked with him on a project that he cared about. He’s brilliant at some things but his god complex is off the charts. He’s an asshole and his deadlines were insane, but he’s not selling snake oil. It takes a team, and that includes leadership.

Our culture tends to deify leaders when it’s really a team effort. Don’t blindly hate the guy because others fawn over him. He’s human, and a deeply flawed one at that, but wow can he motivate a team to achieve the impossible.

"If all it took was assembling a team of ace engineers then Musk would be unremarkable and we’d have no end to amazing things" ever heard of bell labs?

These people and quite a few other experts in this field disagree with you.

> When I met Elon it was apparent to me that although he had a scientific mind and he understood scientific principles, he did not know anything about rockets. Nothing. That was in 2001. By 2007 he knew everything about rockets - he really knew everything, in detail. You have to put some serious study in to know as much about rockets as he knows now. This doesn't come just from hanging out with people.

Robert Zubrin - aerospace engineer

> Elon is brilliant. He’s involved in just about everything. He understands everything. If he asks you a question, you learn very quickly not to go give him a gut reaction.

He wants answers that get down to the fundamental laws of physics. One thing he understands really well is the physics of the rockets. He understands that like nobody else. The stuff I have seen him do in his head is crazy.

He can get in discussions about flying a satellite and whether we can make the right orbit and deliver Dragon at the same time and solve all these equations in real time. It’s amazing to watch the amount of knowledge he has accumulated over the years.

Kevin Watson - Head of Avionics, Launcher

https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/k1e0ta/eviden...

Maybe? But I think he and others would argue that Twitter was gradually losing popularity and had no direction. So I'm not sure "slow death" is such a great culture to hold onto.