He staged mock naval battles in the lake/canal behind Versailles.
Which, admittedly, sounds pretty awesome.
With-out France, there were a lot of wars.
Howard Hughes also had some mental health issues, similar to Elon Musk.
All the adults are clucking their tongues at him but presumably they'd be fine with him being a quiet entry in the Panama Papers and the Epstein flight logs with the other billionaires.
It would be "fun" if it only affected him. But there are real people who get caught in the blast radius of his "fun."
Who are these "real people" you talk of? I find it interesting in this age of diversity and acceptance of differences, that a "Musk character" can't exist without a constant deluge of backlash, ridicule and grumpiness!
Seriously?
OK, I'll give you an easy one: Google "Twitter layoffs."
That doesn't mean that people's lives weren't upended. You're arguing a completely different point.
If Musk were doing all of the same things, and much worse, without the culture war stuff attached we would never hear his name.
"I take full responsibility for this difficult decision..."
No one has a right to have a particular job, if it's no longer deemed necessary.
One might be lucky enough to have such a job.
But if it goes *poof* overnight then the appropriate take should probably be "It was nice while it lasted."
PS: And we can lament the gutting of their moderation team, but that comprised a small proportion of the total headcount cut.
Musk paid billions too much for Twitter. So at least a few of those real people you're worried about, are now very rich.
Companies have layoffs. Are you saying the thousands of layoffs at Meta, or any other tech businesses in recent times, are "good layoffs", but Twitter layoffs were "bad layoffs"? I don't understand your position here. You seem to have an emotional response about the welfare of tech sector people you don't know.
If you have Twitter on your resume, I'd expect it would open a few doors when job hunting. Your concern for their welfare is odd to say the least.
Would you have preferred every employee, including the most loyal and hard-working, to lose their jobs too?
Musk has multiple Epstein connections including having gone to his house, he’s exactly like the other billionaires.
Edit: So, the top results on connections say there are none, and then snopes saying the claims are false (https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/musk-jet-epstein-island/). So this appears to just be libelous rumors.
https://www.statesman.com/story/news/2023/05/16/elon-musk-je...
"Several years ago, I was at his house in Manhattan for about 30 minutes in the middle of the afternoon with Talulah, as she was curious about meeting this strange person for a novel she was writing," Musk said. "We did not see anything inappropriate at all, apart from weird art. He tried repeatedly to get me to visit his island. I declined."
And the people in my world who are upset about Twitter do not give anyone a pass on the Epstein flight logs and Panama Papers.
[1] mostly. there is the matter of the habitat destruction because SpaceX failed to listen to experts.
edit: formatting
the fact that one single app has that much influence means it ought to be destroyed. I was hoping Musk would walk into Twitter, pull the plug, and go home. Now I hope, maybe, he'll just grind it to dust.
Seems like the normal case for right-thinking, properly-educated citizens so I guess I'm just a weirdo contrarian.
Regarding your complaints about twitter:
> In response to a 2017 request from the Pentagon, Twitter kept online a network of accounts that the U.S. military used to advance its interests in the Middle East
It’s not so much fun when it’s directed against you, is it?
someone else posted a howard hughes comparison and i think that is quite apt, including the dating of movie or music stars, and the inevitable mental health issues
One, I was pretty impressed by.
The second? I’ve had less wind noise riding my motorcycle.
Still very hit and miss.
Doesn’t mean I’m not looking to buy one after they refresh them next year, but you definitely don’t get Lexus quality for your Lexus money.
Thousands of employees build it. In the case of SpaceX and Tesla, they frequently build it in spite of Musk, dedicating time and effort to preventing him from screwing things up when he breezes in.
https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/k1e0ta/eviden...
https://youtu.be/t705r8ICkRw?t=378
This lie seems mostly accepted only by non-technical people in technical fields from what I've found out. Leads me to believe Elon actually is one of those great people that will be more appreciated after his passing.
Chief engineer is a title Musk has given himself. It's without any value. Anyone in control of a company can award themself whatever title they want. I could label myself chief lovemaking officer, and it wouldn't mean shit.
Congratulations for making the internet worse.
No said Musk isn’t smart. No one said he isn’t capable nor a multi-disciplinarian.
But to pretend he’s the chief/lead engineer of either SpaceX or Tesla (let alone both, at the same time) is laughably naive.
My original reply was to a comment saying Musk is just a money bag. The second comment I replied to was saying that Elon "giving himself" the Chief Engineer title doesn't change anything, effectively carrying over the original claim.
"Chief/Lead Engineer" I guess this can mean a lot of different things. Reason I put "giving himself" to quotes, is because I've been in a situation in a few companies where titles weren't really much of a thing but if someone naturally ended up being in a leading role they would start to be called with such a title.
Given that Elon likes to be hands-on, obviously has a lot of agency, is motivated, and works long hours while shuttling around in his jet every few days (you can hear him saying summaries of his % time used by whichever company in many interviews), I really don't see it impossible that he's grown to the shoes being discussed. I haven't heard anyone saying he's the lead engineer at multiple companies at the same time, though he probably has had periods of putting a lot more time to a specific company, like with Tesla during the over-automation production hell.
I think this comes down to subjectivity and personal experience of what the title pertains. My experience as a Lead Engineer in software has come naturally as I have developed base of tech before others joined and cared for it, including reading most of other people's commits while working 1.5-2x the hours of others. This is in smaller companies. Probably in a bigger company, person with the title would use 70% of their time doing code review and attending meetings, working in a more tiered structure and being less hands-on.
Can I ask why you think the Everyday Astronaut's interview (series) _specifically_ makes Musk incompatible with the "Lead Engineer" title?
Assuming you aren’t, the level of fanboyism you’re showing throughout the comment in this thread borders on the deranged.
Don’t bother replying with another walk of text.
Now it's not much of anything. No backing, No argument. Just some lame personal attack? Seriously?
The actual comment you originally replied to:
"Thousands of employees build it. In the case of SpaceX and Tesla, they frequently build it in spite of Musk, dedicating time and effort to preventing him from screwing things up when he breezes in."
From your own links:
"We’ll have, you know, a group of people sitting in a room, making a key decision. And everybody in that room will say, you know, basically, “We need to turn left,” and Elon will say “No, we’re gonna turn right.” You know, to put it in a metaphor. And that’s how he thinks. He’s like, “You guys are taking the easy way out; we need to take the hard way.”
And, uh, I’ve seen that hurt us before, I’ve seen that fail (Emphasis mine), 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."
Stopped clocks are also occasionally right, but frequently wrong.
FYI, there's more upvotes than downvotes in total. The most noted visible one was at ~5 then magically dropped to -1. Even though it obviously has merit and hosts a lot of conversation below it, which makes the downvotes a bit suspect.
>narrow reading of peoples comments.
This seems like that KGB tactic of turning one's argument on its head. What is actually happening is I'm putting way more effort to answering to ill-informed comments because I just don't like watching obvious lies, even if comforting to some, on the web. This is more draining than giving I can say ...
>The actual comment you originally replied t....
-Nnope. You picked the subheading right after the main lie: "Musk doesn't build any of that, he's just a source of cash, like a bank crossed with a toddler."
>From your own links etc etc
It takes trying to read what you've read negatively. For a more illuminating view, there's actually a part that partially answers this in the provided video: https://youtu.be/t705r8ICkRw?t=810 (timestamped link). It's his own stake. You're claiming it's 100% confirmation bias that Elon is given any credit. Let me _try_ to present another take:
People remember conflict way better than success. So if it hurts them 20% of the time but succeeds 80% of the time, people WILL remember when it bit them in the ass. Because in that specific instance, everyone was against Elon, and it failed. But in the long the general practice has worked wonders. And obviously turns fail to success faster than a NASA-like forever project process. If I was working in such an inspiring field, I would give a kidney to have a leader that frequently took even half that kind of personal risk to favor progress instead of peace.
_These are qualities I don't just appreciate in Elon, but everyone in power who practices these._ Sadly people usually just pick the conformist path, to avoid hurt feelings, sometimes even if it's their own money (for god's sake!)
If you want to pick anecdotes, from when that video was filmed Raptor 2 has been greatly simplified while its performance has increased IIRC. Among with the cold/hot gas reuse for BFR, idea that was actually spawned through rubber ducking during the EA interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WY73exaVpyw
By the way, you just completely dodged the question to your earlier criticism! Did you really have nothing?! I'm actually still willing to engage in civil conversation. That is what I'm trying to turn this often self-hate fest in to.
This argument is extremely funny in retrospect, with one of your posts being totally dead. I hope you adjusted at least some of your priors after this . . .
Zzz...
It's not completely irrelevant, they both sexual harassed employees: https://www.businessinsider.com/spacex-paid-250000-to-a-flig...
Trying to pull that kind of strings together on a conspiracy bulletin board with red eyes and shaggy hair in a dank cellar together doesn't really add value to the conversation.
It's like they have a personal investment in Elon not having done the things that Elon has very clearly actually done.
Reddit is overflowing with non-stop Musk hatred. They spout lie after lie about him in every single thread where he's a topic. The most popular lie being that his business efforts - ie his success - were funded by an emerald mine that his father owned (neither thing is true).
The goal is to strip Musk, top to bottom, of any and all personal accomplishments. And to repeat any lies necessary, as many times as necessary, to reach that end.
I say this as an emotionally independent, objective observer of the craziness, I have no stake in it, and don't feel one way or another about it. The seeming mental illness the topic of Musk draws out of people is astounding however, the herd promptly acts like deranged lunatics when he comes up as a topic. Partisan collectivism mentality in action perhaps.
Until Trump drove them nuts I had never seen anything like it before, in person or online. There must be a name for such a massive scale of crowd insanity, to describe the frothing-at-the-mouth irrationality that a single entity can spur in a very large number of people.
No need to ascribe political malice where typical internet popularity-seeking will suffice.
"Elon didn't have anything to do with his companies' technical successes" and "Elon had everything to do with his companies' technical successes" are both low-energy, groupthink-supported replies at this point.
I don’t see anyone claiming Steve Jobs personally designed the iPhone PCB by hand while mining cobalt on the weekends to stay in shape, but on the other, I don’t see anyone claiming that he just provided money and the vision and engineers just manifested themselves.
Much easier to say “musk is actually a lucky idiot” than say “musk worked hard and built a multi billion dollar empire”.
The first avoids personal responsibility for their failures, while the second will send their narcissistic amygdala into a meltdown.
He fell upward every time and started with a sizable fortune. He absolutely didn't work so hard that he "built" a multi-billion dollar empire, no one human can work that hard.
Give it a rest.
Besides which, I can absolutely guarantee you that if I gave you a “small loan of one million dollars”, you’d be bankrupt by the end of the decade.
https://www.snopes.com/news/2022/11/17/elon-musk-emerald-min...
https://www.snopes.com/news/2022/11/17/elon-musk-emerald-min...
Try harder.
"According to a Facebook post from Errol, the Zambian emerald mine he held a stake in "collapsed in 1989.""
Which by definition means he owned an emerald mine during the apartheid Era.
Regardless of his political beliefs or leanings, there is no means or manner in which such a mine could have operated _at_all_ without being advantaged by said apartheid norms and thereby being dependent on whar in effect slave labor.
How about You try harder.
Nothing else, carry on ...
Do you really need that or are you just sealioning?
After that, he seems to have been in the position of having to make his own way, while only getting help by a partial investment from his family in a further round of his already-succeeding company that he set up living in his office. So in the positions millions have been. There aren't millions of Musks around but there are millions of younger adults that have more than they deserve. But facts don't bend for your weird fantasies to be true.
Funny thing is, some time ago I thought Elon came from a background where he got a lot of money to start his successes, and still cheered him for making so much more from that than really anyone else. Then people started trying to show in him bad light, which backfired hilariously and now his origin story puts almost anyone to shame.
^ then don't engage in actions which could be misconstrued as such. It's Poes law mfer.
Also, youre shifting goalposts. Tossing out herring and engaging many other fallacies.
If I were a betting man, I'd put money on the probability that you are in fact being disingenuous or are a delusional fool....
Again, if you dont like that reasonable perception of you then alter the behaviors that induce said perception.
I am not shifting goalposts. Note that I'm not the original arguer here. I just noted that you basically doomed Elon from birth regardless of what good he's done during his life, which is a crazy weak argument.
I know people who think that casually considering non-comformists delusional is reasonable. They come in many sorts, but most often its Occam's razor so I don't hate and won't get more involved.
I am not disingenuous. I just hope people would cheer on the people of our time who push on innovation instead of attacking them for their money or pecularities. With enough mass just throwing lazy attacks things can only get worse for everybody.
This is just devolving into typical troll vs antitroll bs and I'm not interested in participating.
Review the thread and return to the actual arguments presented rather than continuing to avoid the actual issues raised/admitting you were wrong.
>Just a FYI your argument is that Elon got a Huge Head Start to his serial entrepreneurism just because someone in relation to him had a business 40+ years ago in South Africa. Far after which he lived almost as a destitute during his college years.
Which you can't retort and makes other arguments meaningless. Which are already so badly-colored (narcissism, trying to dredge up race relations) that are not worth deliberating on for anyone's sake.
Seriously, this was actually already answered.
Quit sealioning.
That’s a year of tech-bro salary.
Why aren’t you a multi-billionaire yet? Surely you can turn 400k into at least one billion dollars, since you obviously look down on musk so much.
Or is even 400k more than your earning potential?
Need I say more?
The only thing they seem to contribute to is… the global scale.
> top 5% childhood positioning, services, access to material and equipment, and more.
Strawman, moving goalposts, etc.
"top 5% childhood positioning, services, access to material and equipment, and more.
Strawman, moving goalposts, etc."
Nope what i listed were specifics, those advantages he gained.
You know that but chose to misrepresent with a red herring.
This is the SOP for Elon fanbois, just more trolling type behaviors just like thier wannabe lord and savior.
Really... it's rather sad and disheartening to know you folks actually drank the Kool aid and aren't just playing games, rather actually think like this and genuinely believe you arent fools.
Social media on the other hand doesn’t attract the same kind of believers at that level and there’s no one who cares enough to make it work in spite of him. Being a far less (or barely at all) regulated industry means he’s free to intervene and meddle in the most egregious ways, and the results are obvious for all to see. As a result of Twitter he’ll likely be in lawsuits (from investors, banks etc) for decades. Meantime SpaceX and Tesla will continue to do well. Not because of Musk but in spite of him.
Rivian’s current sales numbers rival Ferrari.
Fisker is dead.
Faraday is dead.
Nikola just had a truck catch fire twice.
Lordstown is dead.
And if any of what you claim is true, then explain the success of:
Zip2
PayPal
Starlink (we can count this as separate from spaceX)
And he was a co-founder of openAI. Though whether he actually did anything useful there is debatable.
Bezo's mission is to offer orbital fun rides to cashed up tourists.
Fisker failed due to its major investor (DOE) halting future financing, and then being hit with the loss of a large number of vehicles in Hurrican Katrina. Up until then they were following a similar startup arc (with the same sorts of problems) as Tesla had in their first few years. [0]
With PayPal, Musk was insistent that the venture proceed as X.com (despite brand testing showing that people were likely to associate it with porn), but was overruled. He was also opposed to the sale to eBay, which actually catapulted PayPal in terms of growth, and embedded it as a "must have" for e-commerce. [1] [2]
[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/04/fisker-...
[1] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/was-elon-musk-fired-from-p...
[2] https://nypost.com/2018/07/24/elon-musk-made-his-first-milli...
https://www.theregister.com/2022/11/14/musk_twitter_rpc_spat...
Elon Musk is what happens when a 17-year-old stoner is the richest man in the world. He builds cars and trains and tunnels and flamethrows and rockets.
Everyone tries to blame his money or his childishness, when the obvious answer is right there lighting up in public and blowing smoke on podcasts.
As a seasoned stoner it doesn't look like Musk has much experience smoking weed if the Rogan video is anything to go by.
So I have hard time accepting ad hominem arguments as anything but jealous, uninformed, or just plain conformist. Or maybe some people like to just speak untruths with the mindset that the billionaire can take it, but find that anti-intellectual and unnecessarily polarizing.
(This is a comment in general, not an attack on the parent comment but critiquing the generally hateful air I'd expect the HN crowd to be above of)
I literally can't believe anyone can type this with (presumably) a straight face. That's some kind of sarcasm, right?
I want to know what planet you live on because I can't seem to find another one on mine.
Tesla solar. Tesla powerwall. The single biggest infrastructure for EV charging in the world, without which EV’s would have never taken off.
What Tesla figures out so, was that charging infrastructure was the early EV winner, nobody else did that. Whether Tesla's netwirk is still the largest in the world, no idea.
You mean the country we’re in a low-key Cold War in with?
That doesn’t seem to be something to celebrate.
If you're going to defend him for this, you have to admit his distractions have be a hindrance to the cause. Rather than running Tesla and making sure its the market leader across market segments, he's been off on side quests. And now his side quest is making people not want Teslas.
I think he stated that his underlying big plan was to act in fields that he thinks will have the most impact in the future, being good business while not just profit-driven, after he got the PayPal money (Can't find a source right now though) in which he has succeeded, profiting from making the world better, instead, for example, lobbying against ICE's and then providing "just-good-enough" Environmental(r) ShittyCars(tm)
He also has shifted his focus accordingly when Tesla, and at part, SpaceX, were at dire straits. For his kind of personality, I'm not sure just working more would even transfer as simply to linear benefit on that thing.
You don't have to love Musk, plenty of reasons not to but jeez tone it down a bit. It's like if he was seen eating a taco suddenly tacos would be embarrassing and sad according to you.
Everyone else is on some random "responsible" profit driven train to increase quarterly profits by meager single digit % so they don't rock the boat. The west is on a downward slide of "responsible" and average behavior of do the least amount of anything whilst the world moves forward with actual ambition, childish or otherwise.
Something that I was wondering while I was reading about Heinlein and his books was why I hadn't read him. My school library was surprisingly well stocked in classic science fiction, which I explored and read a lot of. So I assume it must have also had Heinlein, unless he'd been 'censored' because of some of his more radical content but the library did have the Illuminatus trilogy, so I don't think so. Did I just never find his books, or did I find them and reject them? It's odd, because I pretty much read any science fiction I could find back then.
I'm much less tolerant of science fiction now, to the point of being somewhat intolerant. I often label people as suffering from 'science fiction brain' and I certainly apply that label to Musk for his beliefs in things like that 'Artificial Intelligence' is actually possible (I consider it only an idea to play with in books and not ever feasible in reality). That's why I found your comment interesting; as an insight to the roots of such a 'science fiction brain'.