The state was warned repeatedly that its plans were too complex. SNCF, the French national railroad, was among bullet train operators from Europe and Japan that came to California in the early 2000s with hopes of getting a contract to help develop the system.
The company’s recommendations for a direct route out of Los Angeles and a focus on moving people between Los Angeles and San Francisco were cast aside, said Dan McNamara, a career project manager for SNCF.
The company pulled out in 2011.
“There were so many things that went wrong,” Mr. McNamara said. “SNCF was very angry. They told the state they were leaving for North Africa, which was less politically dysfunctional. They went to Morocco and helped them build a rail system.”
Morocco’s bullet train started service in 2018.
But sure, blame Elon for California setting tens of billions of dollars on fire with nothing to show for it. Also Florida just built a high speed rail in under a decade for about 1/30th the per-mile cost of the CA project and it'll be open early next year.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/09/us/california-high-speed-...
https://twitter.com/parismarx/status/1167410460125097990
Separately the Florida "HSR" isn't all that comparable because it only goes 80mph with a planned max of 125mph for future routes, and afaict a lot of it was built on an existing corridor. Again, not to say California HSR has been well managed, but imo it's not a particularly useful datapoint to compare against.
Is that really the meat of this "allegation"?
There is - to me - obviously no chance that that would derail HSR, and Musk is definitely smart enough to understand that.
Also, the effect on car sales 15 years in the future in a small corner of the global market is such a tiny thing. I'd easily believe that, as a California tax payer, he was annoyed at $100B being spent on something that probably won't work.
Well he seems to be that dumb then. That or Ashley Vance is a complete and total liar. fwiw I think it was a long shot but not as absurd as you see it. There was already a lot of opposition to it with decades of no progress and money spent without a single mile of track being built, meanwhile Elon was quite the rising star of green technology. He had a vision for transportation of personal automobiles + tunnels and hyperloop and all he had to do was get legislators to buy into it compared to an unpopular embarrassment of a project.
But either way, you're right I probably shouldn't have included speculation as to why he did it.
> annoyed at $100B being spent on something that probably won't work.
So instead he proposed something that definitely won't work?
Also I'm not aware of anyone at any point that thought it "probably won't work". A waste of money, mismanaged, is gonna get cancelled, etc? Sure, but it was proven technology 30 years ago.
Stopping global warming requires more mass transit, and Musk is actively opposed to that. "Making humanity interplanetary" is simply impossible with current or forseeable technology, so there is no sense in attempting yet (especially since we can develop this technology on Earth, by creating self-sustaining habitats in the Arctic desert, if we really want to).
Sure, as an interim step to making humanity interplanetary. Are you suggesting that he could find commercial success without taking those intermediate steps?
> Tesla is a car company, aimed at making and selling cars.
Tesla make solar roofs and grid level energy storage. Like I said, it's portfolio is very clearly geared at climate change solutions.
> Stopping global warming requires more mass transit, and Musk is actively opposed to that.
Maybe he is (I've heard he's a bit of a germaphobe). I suspect he also recognizes that America is a car culture and that that won't change anytime soon.
My point is that the rockets are the easiest part of settling Mars. We already had rockets, and scaling that up was never a huge unknown. The real problems with settling Mars are the things that Musk is spending nothing on - building safe self-sustaining habitats in extreme conditions. Until we have a 10000+ self-sustaining city underground in the Arctic, there is 0 reason to send more than a handful of people to Mars (like we did to the Moon). So, if you actually care about that, you should be investing in the Arctic city, not Mars.
> I suspect he also recognizes that America is a car culture and that that won't change anytime soon.
We can try to guess what he believes, or we can look at his actions and their results - and in the latter case, he has repeatedly spoken and acted against public transport (in most hyper-loop and Boring Company presentations at least).
Then why did NASA never create cost-effective reusable launch vehicles?
> The real problems with settling Mars are the things that Musk is spending nothing on - building safe self-sustaining habitats in extreme conditions.
I'm not sure how this refutes the claim that this is one of his ultimate goals. He's not going to invest in the kind of research you describe until it's necessary or will plausibly create a return. He has to keep a business focus to continue funding these efforts because governments have been seriously falling short on all of these efforts.
> We can try to guess what he believes, or we can look at his actions and their results - and in the latter case, he has repeatedly spoken and acted against public transport (in most hyper-loop and Boring Company presentations at least).
OK, I still don't see why that's problem. Public mass transit is not going to save the planet on its own. Personal transport is something like only 20% of global emissions. EVs can get that down to below 5%, and public transit might make another single digit difference over that. It's just not a big change.
Because NASA was usually about pushing the limits of science and engineering, not making money on space launches. Also, it has often been severely mismanaged.
> I'm not sure how this refutes the claim that this is one of his ultimate goals. He's not going to invest in the kind of research you describe until it's necessary or will plausibly create a return. He has to keep a business focus to continue funding these efforts because governments have been seriously falling short.
You're the one claiming SpaceX was created to address an existential crisis. I'm telling you SpaceX is not bringing us any closer to being an interplanetary species, and if Musk cared about this goal, he wouldn't have invested in SpaceX to begin with.
>OK, I still don't see why that's problem. Public mass transit is not going to save the planet on its own. Personal transport is something like only 20% of global emissions. EVs can get that down to below 5%, and public transit might make another single digit difference over that. It's just not a big change.
No, they can't. Replacing all ICEs with EVs would basically require doubling the electricity grid in the USA for example, and that is simply not a realistic possibility - especially given that the grid is already far too dirty and we need to replace a huge amount of it with green tech to reach CO2 emissions goals even without the extra pressure from EVs.
So, the realistic goal is to significantly expand the much much more efficient public transport (trains, buses, trams, metro) to significantly reduce the amount of cars (which will also do wonders for reducing congestion), and convert just the remaining cars to EVs, at a rate that can be supported by the grid while also shutting down existing coal, oil and gas power production.
Pushing science and engineering requires using money wisely, and creating a reusable launch vehicle is an obvious way to do that. In fact NASA did have multiple efforts that ultimately stalled, and literally none of them looked like what SpaceX did. You simply have no basis upon which to claim that SpaceX's reusable launch vehicles were not innovative.
> You're the one claiming SpaceX was created to address an existential crisis. I'm telling you SpaceX is not bringing us any closer to being an interplanetary species, and if Musk cared about this goal, he wouldn't have invested in SpaceX to begin with.
I honestly have no idea how you can conclude this. We're taking our first baby steps into space and you're saying baby steps are meaningless because they're far from running marathons. This argument is incredibly unconvincing.
> No, they can't. Replacing all ICEs with EVs would basically require doubling the electricity grid in the USA for example, and that is simply not a realistic possibility
The grid needs to expand anyway to handle renewable intermittency. You're also assuming that EVs would be powered from the grid. Tesla has the powerwall and solar roof tiles to address distributed power generation rather than reliance on the grid for everything.
> So, the realistic goal is to significantly expand the much much more efficient public transport (trains, buses, trams, metro) to significantly reduce the amount of cars (which will also do wonders for reducing congestion), and convert just the remaining cars to EVs, at a rate that can be supported by the grid while also shutting down existing coal, oil and gas power production.
What I'm reading here is that Musk's Tesla is addressing the existential risk of climate change, just not in the way you personally think it should be addressed. Seems beside the point frankly.
I didn't claim that they were not innovative, I claimed that they were not revolutionary - that is a big difference.
> We're taking our first baby steps into space and you're saying baby steps are meaningless because they're far from running marathons. This argument is incredibly unconvincing.
We have taken our first baby steps into space a few decades ago, and none of what SpaceX is currently doing is bringing us to any place new - we've already been to the Moon and to Mars, and we've been to plenty more exotic places.
The problem of space colonization is just not the rockets.
> The grid needs to expand anyway to handle renewable intermittency.
The grid needs to expand, but the fewer consumers there are, the less it needs to expand, so the easier it is to close down the big polluters.
> What I'm reading here is that Musk's Tesla is addressing the existential risk of climate change
I am saying that overall EVs are at best close to neutral - they obviously pollute less than ICEs if the grid is green enough, but they will also delay the green-ification of the grid if adopted in enough numbers to matter. Not to mention, Teslas are typically pretty big cars. If Musk cared about climate change and it weren't just an afterthought, there are more important businesses he could have gotten into (such as green power generation directly).
Sure, but I'm not sure why SpaceX has to be revolutionary in that sense. It was revolutionary in the sense of taking space launches private. Or am I wrong in thinking SpaceX was the first company to successfully commercialize space launch, and the first company to successfully dock a commercially financed and owned vehicle with the ISS?
> We have taken our first baby steps into space a few decades ago, and none of what SpaceX is currently doing is bringing us to any place new
So what? You can't build a skyscraper without the right foundation. SpaceX is still building the foundations for routine space flight. Again, this seems like you complaining that you don't yet have a penthouse when they're still pouring the concrete foundation.
> If Musk cared about climate change and it weren't just an afterthought, there are more important businesses he could have gotten into (such as green power generation directly).
Firstly, the incumbents are too large in that industry to compete with. He was a millionaire when he started Tesla, and you wanted him to focus on building wind turbines or solar cells to compete with huge multinationals like Siemens? Come on. Electric vehicles was completely underserved market by contrast, a clear business opportunity that also serves similar ends.
Secondly, nobody is so altruistic that they'd work as hard as Musk does on something that they weren't passionate about, even if it were good for humanity. Musk clearly likes cars. Humanity arguably needs electric cars. Musk combined a passion for cars with humanity's need. This is what progress under capitalism looks like.
To say he should work slavishly on something he's not passionate about for the betterment of humanity is setting up an ethical bar that nobody would clear. The people who do work on non-profits are passionate about that.
Good for him? I'm not sure why that is something to praise.
> Again, this seems like you complaining that you don't yet have a penthouse when they're still pouring the concrete foundation.
It's the other way around: cheap space flight is the penthouse of planetary colonization. The foundation is the ability to build a self-sufficient colony. Once we were able to colonize the least hospitable places on Earth, only then would it make sense to think about how we move this technology to Mars - 50 or 100 years from now, most likely.
It's also worth noting that we have no reason to assume that a human population can even survive on Mars, as we have no idea if humans can live long term or even reproduce in Martian conditions (especially the very low gravity). Before even thinking about this colonization, we would actually have to establish whether it's possible for mammals to live long term and reproduce in low-G conditions. If it's not, there's a whole new world of technology we would have to discover before attempting it.
SpaceX is to Mars colonization like buying your dream wedding dress not just before finding a boyfriend, but before even knowing if you're gay or straight.
> Firstly, the incumbents are too large in that industry to compete with.
You could say the same for the car industry itself.
> Musk clearly likes cars. Humanity arguably needs electric cars. Musk combined a passion for cars with humanity's need.
Fair enough.
Rocketry is a similar story. Rockets, since the 60s, have gradually become less capable and more expensive. For instance Boeing/Lockheed have been granted defacto unlimited taxpayer money to develop a basic functional 'homegrown' rocket system - the SLS. The goal was achieve little more than we did in the 60s. They started work 11 years ago, have received more than $30 billion, and and have yet to manage to get off the ground. Stay tuned for their latest failure - they will [fail to] launch on November 14th! For reference, we went from nothing to putting a man on the moon in 9 years in the 60s.
If it ever manages to be fit for duty, the SLS is estimated to cost an average of $2 billion per flight, and is completely incapable of landing massive-load cargo on Mars, let alone transiting things back. It's completely and absolutely unfit for duty. Most of everything Musk has done with SpaceX was being mocked as literally impossible by Boeing et al (by Tory Bruno) while he was struggling to achieve rapid reuse among various other technologies which have completely revolutionized the industry.
We would not be getting to Mars had SpaceX (or a similar company) not emerged.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org//wiki/Antarctic_Treaty_System
Regardless, a self-sustaining habitat is a research project, and it will not be successful without political/diplomatic agreement.
Note that outer space is anyway in the same situation - you can't just settle outer space and claim it's your own - especially Mars, which is still a pristine environment that could even possibly harbor signs of life.
Quick? No. Fast maybe. It’s hard to replicate the quickness of jumping into your car and hopping onto the freeway to get somewhere. Little or no planning required. Yeah the train if it is deployed as envisioned would be faster.
Inexpensive? The latest estimate is 107 Billion. Hardly inexpensive.
> Musk created Tesla to counteract the existential risk of climate change,
He created Tesla for the money that's in the growing electric car market
> Neuralink to counteract the existential risk of AI,
Neuralink exists for the possible future where neural computer interfaces are successful and popular so he can make lots of money
> and SpaceX to counteract the existential risk of asteroids and other planet-killing catastrophes.
Actually, SpaceX exists because there's tons of money to be made with government and commercial contracts.
> Maybe that's why the people at his companies stay despite being pushed so hard?
It's probably more because they like getting paid so they can afford nice things while they're not working. It might also be because Musk enterprises are in "interesting" areas of the job spectrum and thus workers might be more tolerant to bullshit because they get to tell themselves they launched a rocket into space.
He arguably created that market. The same applies to your other points. Musk created the markets that didn't exist before. Others had tried and failed, so I'm sorry, but you just can't deny that. It could be luck, so I suppose we'll see.
I have no doubt that Musk is interested in making money. I also have no doubt he enjoys that money from time to time. However, I think it's indisputable that no other billionaire works as hard as he does at his ventures, and I think a lot of his interest in that money is so that he can continue funding work to combat those existential risks.
> It's probably more because they like getting paid so they can afford nice things while they're not working.
Maybe you should read up on the working environment at these companies. There's not as much downtime as you imply. I personally wouldn't want to work for him given his management style, even on these existential problems.
He didn't, he started the company at a time where governments all over the word started to really (depending on the country, obviously) kick companies butts for not innovating. There where electric cars before he started his company. Now, you could argue that he made it popular with the people, but I argue that the market penetration, especially during the early years, hasn't been sufficient for that.
Musk also didn't invent space travel. You may have a point with neuralink, but I have yet to see a successful product come from that so if he is to create that market I'll give him that.
He's really good at making his opinions heard though. Other companies don't have a relatively unfiltered channel like this, so it's easy to see how his viewpoints stick out.
Yes, and they all failed commercially. I'm not sure what point you think I'm making. It's undeniable that Musk was instrumental in creating the first commercially successful electric car. If he took advantage of government incentives to do so, that doesn't seem relevant, that's just good business sense.
If your argument is that anyone could have succeeded in that environment, then why was Tesla the only successful electric car manufacturer for literally years? Do you disagree that the roadster made electric cars cool, and changed public perception on electric vehicles?
> Musk also didn't invent space travel.
Again, I'm not sure why this is relevant. Musk created the first commercially successful private launch company. Do you agree or disagree?
I'm not disputing that Musk is also after money and fame and probably a few other things. I'm not sure why that's relevant to my point either. Even if it's enlightened self-interest driving him, it remains the case that Musk either founded or took over and pushed successful commercial ventures that are tackling existential risks to humanity.
Because every other car manufacturer had no incentives to invest in that space when their ICE technology was working well for them. Musk made the bet that he could go big and make lots of money with that missed opportunity, and he arguably did.
Other electric car companies weren't competing because it takes absurd amounts of money or people willing to give you that money, which Musk has.
> Do you disagree that the roadster made electric cars cool, and changed public perception on electric vehicles
I don't live in the US and honestly, while I saw some tesla cars rolling around here, their popularity correlated very strong with the rise of other brands. It's almost like consumers aren't opposed to the idea of electric vehicles, it's just that until that point all options where shit and tesla finally put some pressure on that market, so the other companies reacted.
> Musk created the first commercially successful private launch company. Do you agree or disagree?
He did, and I argue that it's just like the first point, it was inevitable and Musk made the right call to invest his money in commercial launch operations because there where tons of money to be made.
This wasn't about if he started those companies, it's about the why. And the why is: There's tons of money to be made.
Yes, the question is indeed why: so why did he just so happen to invest in the only ventures where humanity is facing existential risk, when there are so many other ventures that could also have yielded great returns with less risk? Are you suggesting it's merely coincidence? Or is it simply more plausible that Musk recognized the problems that needed solving and found a way to make lots of money from them?
I have yet to see someone successfully explain how neuralink will protect anyone from "AI".
Electric cars may have some success shifting our oil based man-transports to electric, but the world fails to use the advantages that brings and just burns more coal.
Hyperloop doesn't address any urgent problem, it's a moonshot with potential to earn absurd amounts from public contracts.
Twitter is actively harmful for humanity.
So, besides tesla, for which there was probably the best monetary incentive, none of those companies achieve any higher function you advertise then to have.
Firstly, you seriously underestimate the asteroid risk. They literally do appear out of the void and we do not have the resources to track them all, and existing efforts are seriously underfunded. Having a commercial entity that regularly performs multiple launches per year is invaluable as it means we can react more swiftly in case of a late detection, or have multiple attempts at deflecting it. NASA previously had very few launches by comparison, and the fact that their launch systems were not reusable without significant refits makes it ridiculous to claim that we would be just as safe without SpaceX.
Secondly, asteroid risk is only one risk to planet Earth. Another is nuclear war, or climate change, or an even more deadly pandemic, or any number of other things. Making humanity interplanetary requires reliable and frequent launch capability.
> I have yet to see someone successfully explain how neuralink will protect anyone from "AI".
If you agree that artificial general intelligence is an existential risk to humanity, then why is it a risk, exactly? presumably because it has computational abilities that we cannot match with biology. Does it not then follow that augmenting biology with those same abilities would somewhat mitigate those risks? Whether that pans out remains to be seen, but AI performance is accelerating so this is going to become a serious problem within 20 years.
> Hyperloop doesn't address any urgent problem, it's a moonshot with potential to earn absurd amounts from public contracts.
The boring company is not one of his ventures to combat existential risk, and so is not something Musk cares about too much. Why do you think he called it the boring company? Because its products are boring by comparison.
> Twitter is actively harmful for humanity.
He literally just bought it, and he has explicitly stated that he thinks Twitter is important for a functioning democracy. How about you give him a chance to actually prove it out.
The guy is a loon, and while I think he’s done some good for the world (mostly via Tesla), he’s a walking, talking clusterfsck of Dunning-Kruger, narcissism, and unchecked ego.
Might want to check again. He didn't create Tesla, he invested in it. Musk didn't create SpaceX, he invested in it.
And IMHO, if he was really concerned about the existential risk for AI, perhaps he shouldn't have let the Ethical AI research team go from Twitter.
To be clear, Ethical AI - being able to trace an AI's decisions and vet that those decisions aren't being biased by improper input data - is a big topic in research groups right now. It's actually quite fascinating.
Even if true (Wikipedia disagrees), it's a distinction without a difference. Arguably, neither SpaceX nor Tesla would be where they are now without him.
> And IMHO, if he was really concerned about the existential risk for AI, perhaps he shouldn't have let the Ethical AI research team go from Twitter.
Arguably the kind of AI Twitter needs doesn't pose an existential risk. He's trying to make Twitter profitable so that's obviously a waste of money.
That’s not a great source for truth. IIRC, the “founding” myths for both companies got a rewrite a little after Musk joined. The entry in Tesla is very clear that he was an investor and not founder. But the entry in SpaceX is a little fuzzier.
> Arguably the kind of AI Twitter needs doesn't pose an existential risk. He's trying to make Twitter profitable so that's obviously a waste of money.
Arguably it does. Shaping the public forum of a society can have profound impacts. You could argue that getting Twitter out of the red is more important at this stage (and that’s not a bad argument), but don’t discount the problems an AI at Twitter could cause.
How does Wikipedia disagree?
Originally "Tesla" the brand, was started by Martin and Marc, but all they had was a brand and a vision but no physical product nor prototype.
At around the same time, Elon wanted to build an electric car based off the tzero by AC Propulsion. He was introduced to Martin and Marc who had a similar vision, and basically Elon invested money into Tesla Motors.
It wasn't until Elon put in money, that the first prototype was built (the tesla roadster). Arguably, if Elon didn't join the team and bring on Straubel, Tesla wouldn't be what it is today. Likely wouldn't even have a launched consumer product. Even Elon was the one that managed to get the trademark "Tesla Motors" which wasn't even owned by Martin or Marc originally.
Lengthy source: https://youtu.be/AeeeEDSekG8?t=900
Granted it's out of Elon's mouth but there's tons of other sources that corroborates with that story.
source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MikKu6Juhok
source: https://interestingengineering.com/transportation/the-short-...
source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NqPsdlQDOYQ
source: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/27/with-jb-straubel-departure-t...
More concretely: Helping the teams who actually build and maintain these models ensure that the behavior isn't biased, that the model isn't being exploited by adversarial data, that the decisions made by the model are explainable, that the decisions are fair, coming up with corporate-standard-definitions for those various mutable terms (like fair), etc.
The usual things handled by a team that is tasked with AI Assurance/Ethics.
Now for my opinion: When it comes to impugning Elon Musk's character, he's done enough of that himself. He doesn't need my help. Additionally, firing an AI Ethics team in a company which requires AI(ML) to even operate speaks for itself.
Sure, but this is just a feature of the product in question, so if you have some metrics to measure such outcomes then the product developers themselves can do this checking as part of their development process. I'm not sure why this would need to be a separate division. Presumably Tesla's autonomous driving developers are also creating metrics to ensure they don't run over dogs and children, they don't need a separate ethics division to tell them this is important.
Then there is the far trickier case of the AI picking up on real things that we choose not to accept or talk about. Perhaps it is safe to give an example using white men? When they go bald very early in life(prince William for instance), it generally is due to high testosterone. Which in turn leads to all sorts of predictable behaviors and health issues, good and bad. AI would spot all that from a simple picture, judging people on their appearance can occasionally work really well. But that doesn't mean we should do it. And again, it isn't improper data, just data we choose not to act on.Musk has been the only CEO of SpaceX since he founded the company. Gwynne Shotwell often doesn't get enough credit for her huge role in making SpaceX what it is today, but to say Musk isn't one of the creators of SpaceX is absurd.
Musk has made plenty of bad choices and done unethical things that deserve to be criticized, but that is no excuse for the level of ignorant, misinformed hatred that is directed at him.
On Tesla this your statement is technically true, but misleading. 7 months after the company was founded, and made up of just a handful of people, Musk invested and became the majority shareholder and chairman of the board. He would go on to eventually remove the original founders of the company (over disagreements that were never publicly revealed) before production began on their first product. The original founders played no meaningful role in the company we now know as Tesla.
None of what you said is grounded in reality.
Wait, is this just a clever troll. Really hard to tell with Elon fanboys.
Digging tunnels and conceptualizing hyperloops instead of improving public transport and bikes? IMO he‘s just afraid of public transport and hates traffic jams.
Ok, so maybe he needed to become the richest person in the world before tackling the really big issues? Yeah, not sure whether distracting himself with the Twitter acquisition is the best way of addressing climate change or even preserving survival of the human race long term.
I think that, like Jobs, he’s mainly scratching his own itches. And paints himself as the world‘s savior in the process.
If you view the massive endemic corruption and polarization of our political system as one of the key reasons we are failing to solve climate change, and you also view Twitter as the core public square through which our political system can be fixed, then Twitter is not a distraction at all.
I don't personally think that twitter has a major role to play in fixing our political system, but maybe I'm wrong.
Musk got bullied into buying Twitter by a bunch of WallStreetBets folks, took a puff and tweeted out a number, and surprise surprise, the offer was accepted. And then he’s been struggling to get out of it ever since
Musk didn't create Tesla, he bought it. I don't claim to know why he bought it, but here are two options: maybe it was to solve climate change, and if so it was a failure. Maybe it was to make himself immensely wealthy, and if so it was a success.
As for whether it's a failure, that remains to be seen. Combating climate change is a long-term battle. All of Tesla's products are clearly geared towards this end though, from electric cars to solar roofs to grid level energy storage.
My position is that Musk has focused largely on business that can or do make the world better, and also make a profit. The two are not mutually exclusive and I think the former is a major factor in what Musk selects. Obviously good is determined from Musk's perspective,but I have generally agreed with him with respect to Tesla, spacex, boring, neurolink, solar endeavors, and xprizes.
I don't believe that those up thread were actually claiming Musk will or thinks any of his ventures single handedly will solve climate change. If that was your assumption, I think it was wrong.
I am curious if you agree that his work in these areas is laudable?
I agree that it seems like he is more successful at increasing his fortune than solving the world's problems. I don't hold that against him because the latter is a very tough challenge. I don't hold the fortune against him because it was made from companies that advance humanity, and most of it is tied up in other ventures that also advance humanity. I don't know about the whole Twitter thing, which could be a deviation from this, but I am open to the idea that it could be an improvement over the current state, if not particularly relevant to humanity. I am also open to the idea that he thinks it is more relevant than I do.
People are great at finding ulterior motives for people they've already decided they dislike. I don't think Musk is an altruist, and I'm certain he has multiple motives for the ventures he cares about, but I think it's hard to deny that he's found success where others have struggled, and that his ventures will ultimately benefit humanity.
[0] https://electrek.co/2022/07/07/tesla-tsla-achieves-best-sola...
So, my temptation is to say it's just a publicity stunt. But, I am prepared to praise it if it produces some viable solution, as unlikely as I believe it is.
How does SpaceX counteract the risk of asteroids? NASA has developed a successful asteroid-killing rocket, and SpaceX's work has nothing to do with that field.
AI is a threat because of human information processing limits. Neuralink's ultimate goal is ostensibly to remove eyes and hands as inherent limits to I/O, and augment human information processing in the ways in which we are weak (formal computation).
> How does SpaceX counteract the risk of asteroids? NASA has developed a successful asteroid-killing rocket, and SpaceX's work has nothing to do with that field.
Cheap launch to orbit is critical in any efforts to counteract asteroid threats. Musk has also been very vocal about colonizing Mars in case something happens to the Earth.
He didn't create Tesla. He bought it. He may have grown it, which is impressive, but he certainly wasn't the creator, or funder of the original creators. Ironically, he's more of a Thomas Edison than a Nikola Tesla, in that regard.
Starting an AI/transhumanism company as a CEO who's known for software-locking and remote-controlling his sold cars, isn't very reassuring. I'm quite certain we're going to see "pay $80 a month to unlock your now-societally-vital brain-to-brain communications!" Or a tiered model to his probably inevitable digital eyeballs replacements. "$20 a month for 720p vision, $40 a month for 1080p, $60 for 4K..."
As for SpaceX... so far that's been pretty badass. Government/NASA hasn't been doing crap for exploration or transportation innovation. Nor satellite internet advancements. He's doing all of it himself. To that, I applaud his efforts (and his impressive engineers, to that extent).
You mean like the guy who's trying to address the main existential risks facing humanity right now? Last I checked, Musk created Tesla to counteract the existential risk of climate change, Neuralink to counteract the existential risk of AI, and SpaceX to counteract the existential risk of asteroids and other planet-killing catastrophes. Maybe that's why the people at his companies stay despite being pushed so hard?
He could definitely stand to be less of an ass, but I can at least recognize that Musk is actually doing the kind of good work that you're talking about.