150T... They have been able to crank up the power of the raptors per Elon.

> per Elon

Reason enough right there to not believe it.

Why is your hate boner relevant here? It's fine if you want to be irrational but why shout it out?

We've banned this account for repeatedly breaking the site guidelines.

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Elon also said the Falcon 9 would work, said it would be re-usable, said the Falcon 9 heavy would work, said the Model S would be good, said the Model 3 would be great, said the Model Y would be the most popular car in the world, etc. etc.

Obviously he's not hitting 100%, but you can't deny his companies are achieving immensely more than anyone ever thought possible.

If I could take Elon's ratio of "I said it would work vs. it's real and it does", I would, and so would any sane person.

sane person here, I would only take Elon's claim that something would work seriously if it relied mostly on newtonian mechanics to verify.

which model S being good, falcon 9 working etc, that is all it takes. basic physics napkin math.

anything with nuance (self driving) or human emotions in play (twitter), and he is the same as any boomer uncle complaining about kids these days

Right, and he ballparks 250-300T in expendable mode here:

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1661441658473570304?s=46...

Raptor improved thrust:

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1678276840740343808?s=46...

Raptor 2 improved thrust:

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1657249739925258240?s=46...

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1661441658473570304?s=46...

Love the guy or hate the guy, but on SpaceX numbers (other than timelines), he’s been spot on.

> basic physics napkin math.

Exactly, it's not rocket science. Oh, wait, it actually is.

Right, and you can land on the moon with basic newtonian mechanics. The are millions of devils in the details but for a person to decide how big a rocket to build and whether it could land vertically after a payload of X that needs a delta-V of Y, its easy napkin math to prove feasibility.

Executing it is then one of the hardest things people can do but SpaceX had all the best people at the time.

You can claim anything is easy this way. Just take the easiest subset of a problem, and show how easy it is. I find that to be a pointless argument.

> That is all it takes. basic physics napkin math

And yet Tesla and SpaceX and now wiping the floor with their competitors.

If it was really so "basic", why didn't those other multi-billion dollar companies do what Tesla and SpaceX are doing?

> If I could take Elon's ratio of "I said it would work vs. it's real and it does", I would, and so would any sane person.

I want to be optimistic too, but you're missing Falcon 9s worth of broken Elon promises.

This isn't an exhaustive list, but certainly a more complete: https://elonmusk.today I recommend starting from the bottom.

I'll just say that if he were a baseball player, he would be a pretty bad one. The odds that an Elon prediction pans out are fairly bad. If a bookie were available, you'd want to take the under on every single one.

Feel free to stick your head in the sand due to your own personal bias, but it doesn't make it reality.

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Full Self Driving is imminent and X.com is the future of finance!

Social finance, we will all be networked and worked and paying each other via X ! :)

Please don't post this sort of unsubstantive comment to HN, and please avoid the flamewar style generally when posting here.

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We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36882951.

There's also been a bit of a shift in the market for space launches. For the longest time there wasn't that much of a market for a higher volume, cheaper launcher like the Falcon as the number of launches were really limited to mostly government launches and a handful of communication satellites. Recently hardware has gotten much cheaper which combined with cheaper launches skyrockets the number of groups that could design and send up a payload because the economics on both ends finally met up.

That was the point of Starlink.

If the only capability is incredibly expensive and highly reliable, no demand that only works under cheaper and relaxed reliability exists.

Luckily, the market's caught up pretty quickly.

I think the nuance is different. I think there has always been demand of inexpensive access to space, what did not exist was a company willing to invest in making that true. If you lived through the "Single Stage To Orbit" (SSTO) initiatives that were kicked off by Regan's Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) or "Star Wars" project to put "hundreds" of satellites into orbit, the idea of a cost insensitive customer willing to pay for tens of launches a year, drove a lot of investment into the market. When SDI was cancelled rocket companies bailed and investment fled. Even though billions had been invested in Iridium, and millions had been invested in Teledesic, the "establishment" could not see how having such a capability would be useful. Sort of like prognosticators suggesting that the world demand for computers might be just five from IBM in 1943. People who are stuck looking at the cost/availability in the "now" cannot imagine a future where those things are different.

One of the things I've always looked for in hiring people is the ability to "unconstrain" ones thinking by "rules." Those are the kinds of people who can think about a world where we have a technology to say, "nullify gravity", and what impact that might have on what we do or how we do it. Constrained thinkers will say, "There is no way to 'nullify' gravity so it isn't worth wasting any time thinking about what we could do if we could."

This capability shows me someone who is able to step into a different frame of reference with their reasoning skills intact and sharp. As a result, when there is an "unexpected" discovery or event, they waste little time in cognitive dissonance says "This can't be happening" or "That isn't possible what I'm seeing" and instead jump right to "Hmm if we can do that then <x>, <y>, and <z> could be done too!"

There are a lot of things to dislike Elon for, but one thing that he shares with Steve Jobs is if he believes a thing he is "all in". Sometimes it takes that to get to the other side of an "unthinkable" change.

While you raise a valid point you chose a terrible example as even Elon, as crazy as he is, refuses to go against the laws of physics. Even he has a limit(for now at least). I get that its just an example: its just that Elon might throw you out of his office.

Its also this kind of thinking that gets people into trouble ie. completely destroying a working codebase because one only thinks in first principles and cannot map human factors(which are inherently too complex to reason mathematically) onto this other plane of thinking.

There needs to be a balance between the unconstrained dreamer and the practical realist.

Steve Jobs had a group of trusted confidants (Tim Cook, Ive and the other leaders) to help reel him back to reality from time to time.

You could argue that Bill Gates had Ballmer to help keep in him check.

It's analogous to gigabit internet in the 90's. Why would anyone want that and what would you even do.

I agree. Real question: What do people need gigabit internet for today? 4K UHD streaming video needs 25-50Mbps. I have been living off 100Mbps internet connection for more than a decade, and I feel no need to upgrade. To be fair, maybe gamers need super faster connections for lower latency, or game downloads.

Families, and reducing friction on gaming purchases. The sooner you can download a game (especially with new business models like game pass), the sooner you know whether you like it and the sooner you get positive feedback from your purchase decision. The faster that loop is the more people will impulse buy, and the faster consumers can get the games they want to play.

A huge part of it is less about the gigabit download, and more that gigabit fiber is symmetric and has fast uploads... In the age of being remote, several people can be on HD or even UHD webcams without much lag or hiccups. 12Mbps upload of many cable modems is a noticably worse experience.

Excellent point. I didn't think about video calls needing good upload bandwidth. Many broadband options have terrible upload bandwidth, so you need to buy a ridiculous plan (like 1Gbps) to get reasonable upload bandwidth.