I think Elon has kind of demonstrated that if you just keep stating that you did something with confidence long enough, some people will actually believe it.
So I'm not falling for his bullshit again. But I suppose that's why he wants to own the world's biggest megaphone — to ensure he doesn't run out of us suckers.
I'm very glad I didn't now, because I'm pretty convinced I would have done this half-baked quasi-self-driving feature and probably be dead, or worse killed someone else.
[1] I own a few ETFs that probably buys Tesla stock, so indirectly sure.
These aren't the confident boasts of a charlatan, we have very concrete proof this happened.
Moreover, I don't even know that I buy the idea that the CEO is really the reason for any company's success; are we going to claim that Bill Gates is responsible for the success of desktop computing? I mean, you can if you want but I would not personally say that. I think it's a combination of good marketing, right-place-right-time, and happening to hire the right people for the job.
Even before SpaceX got off the ground, since I was a kid, people have been complaining at how little NASA was accomplishing, so I think someone breaking into the commercial space flight was inevitable. Elon probably does deserve a bit of credit for funding it when he did but I'm not convinced that he was uniquely qualified to to it, and I absolutely reject the notion that "because he was successful with some businesses, he's going to save the world".
He also lies. A lot. Like, more often than he tells the truth. He just makes shit up. He has claimed we will have self-driving cars "next year" for the last 6 years. He has repeatedly claimed that it's something we can do "today". He claimed that the Boring Company can "pay for itself with brick production".
All of this to me kind of implies his success is more stochastic than any kind of eccentric genius.
[1] https://www.csmonitor.com/Business/In-Gear/2015/0312/Tesla-b...
Lying is pretty easy, and I can think of lots of habitual liars that I also think I are very stupid. Without naming anyone specific, think of any politician that you dislike.
He did, but that doesn't come close to the whole story:
• July 1, 2003, Incorporated by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning
…
• August 2007, Eberhard was asked to step down by the board; Michael Marks was brought in as interim CEO
• December 2007, Ze'ev Drori became CEO and President
• May 2008, "The Truth About Cars" website launched a "Tesla Death Watch", as Tesla needed another round of financing to survive
• October 2008, Musk succeeded Drori as CEO and fired 25% of Tesla employees
Leading to:
• By January 2009, Tesla had raised US$187 million ($70 million from Musk) and delivered 147 cars.
Not 147 thousand, just 147. After 5.5 years.
> I don't even know that I buy the idea that the CEO is really the reason for any company's success; are we going to claim that Bill Gates is responsible for the success of desktop computing? I mean, you can if you want but I would not personally say that. I think it's a combination of good marketing, right-place-right-time, and happening to hire the right people for the job.
I think it's all those things, plus luck and skill. Likewise for all the other CEOs out there. It is the opposite side of the same coin as complaining that Musk didn't really found Tesla — yup, he wasn't in the room with Eberhard and Tarpenning, but it was Musk's choices and actions as leader which turned the company from "Tesla Death Watch" to a viable business rather than choosing to close it down and sell off the assets to compensate the shareholders, which would not have been unreasonable given how many people at the time (and even today) are going "Batteries? Pah! Give us hydrogen!" for whatever reason.
> Even before SpaceX got off the ground, since I was a kid, people have been complaining at how little NASA was accomplishing, so I think someone breaking into the commercial space flight was inevitable. Elon probably does deserve a bit of credit for funding it when he did but I'm not convinced that he was uniquely qualified to to it,
I'm excited to see what Relativity Space and Rocket Lab do in this space.
Conversely, Blue Origin (founded 18 months before SpaceX) hasn't done anything impressive.
Musk's qualification sure isn't unique, but that doesn't mean it's universal either.
> and I absolutely reject the notion that "because he was successful with some businesses, he's going to save the world".
Agreed; some of his recent hubris does seem related specifically to this.
> He also lies. A lot. Like, more often than he tells the truth. He just makes shit up. He has claimed we will have self-driving cars "next year" for the last 6 years. He has repeatedly claimed that it's something we can do "today". He claimed that the Boring Company can "pay for itself with brick production".
> All of this to me kind of implies his success is more stochastic than any kind of eccentric genius.
There's a phrase about putting people on pedestals, and the view from those on the ground looking up.
I view him as being a relatively unfiltered stochastic genius. D&D aligment, chaotic neutral. He may only be half as smart as he thinks he is, but he's not actually an idiot, just wildly (and in some cases horrifyingly) over-optimistic.
And his successes are all directly tied to the same personality traits as his failures: he has an idea, he won't let go of it, so he keeps bashing at it until progress happens. And he's an effective salesman so he can bring investors along for that ride.
Sure, maybe I was being overly simplistic, Tesla did grow under his watch so he probably deserves some credit for it. Again, though, I'm not sure how much the CEO actually has to do with that stuff, and I really don't believe that he was directly involved with the engineering.
> Agreed; some of his recent hubris does seem related specifically to this.
What really bothers me are his attempts to intervene in the Russia/Ukraine conflict, to a point where I think that the DHS might need to investigate his bank transactions. I must have missed the election where we decided to choose him to lead the ministry of defense.
> I view him as being a relatively unfiltered stochastic genius.
How much of this is "genius" and how much is just "a stopped clock being right twice a day"? I'm not going to pretend to know, but I could probably write a markov chain to generate a dozen ideas for a product, and if one of them happens to be successful, does that imply that the markov chain is some kind of complicated genius?
I think the way he's handled Twitter has demonstrated that he might not be the genius we thought; I wonder how many of his dumb ideas were quietly rejected when he had some oversight; if nothing else he had to answer to investors and whatnot with Tesla and SpaceX and the like. With Twitter, it's more of a dictatorship and it's a mess.
He disabled it to (ostensibly) prevent nuclear war. I really don't feel that was his decision to make. It's really bizarre that anyone thinks it is. He's not a politician, he's not part of the UN, he's just a fucking businessman and a former software engineer. He does not have any credentials for war strategy, he doesn't have any experience leading a military, he doesn't know anything about politics, he doesn't know anything about foreign policy. He just decided he is going to intervene. That is weird, it's obviously weird, it's unambiguously weird, it would be weird if I did it, it would be weird if you did it, it would be weird if any civilian did it.
And to be clear, he claimed it was to prevent nuclear war. As I've stated multiple times, he lies all the time. I cannot know the inner machinations of his brain, but I do think it's worth the DHS investigating to see if Russia is secretly bribing Musk.
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/13/politics/elon-musk-spacex-sta...
ETA:
> Tom, stick to software and steer clear of geo-politics, it's obviously not your thing.
You added this after the fact, but I feel the need to reply to it.
You're absolutely right, it is really weird for software engineers to intervene in politics. I absolutely agree that civilians have no place in figuring out foreign policy. It would be extremely bizarre for a civilian to do that. I cannot think of any reason for that not to be the case.
So why exactly are you defending Musk on this?
It's 100% his decision to make as CEO and majority owner of SpaceX. You may not agree w/ the decision, and it may not be good for the network or the company, but the decision is still his.
If the Biden administration disagreed, they could have used executive power to force him to do whatever they wanted, he said as much publicly. The government has done this before in the past.
What would probably be illegal is taking money from Russian in exchange for disabling it, and then claiming it was to prevent nuclear war, which is why I think it might be worth investigating bank accounts. I'm not a lawyer, though, so it might just be "gross", and not illegal.
This isn't even getting into the fact that he tweeted multiple times about how he would solve the Ukraine conflict, around the same time, basically just saying "Ukraine should surrender to Russia cuz it'll save lives".
> If the Biden administration disagreed, they could have used executive power to force him to do whatever they wanted, he said as much publicly. The government has done this before in the past.
The US isn't officially directly involved with the conflict so I don't actually know that they could force him. They're providing funding and the like, but I don't know that they could use any kind of wartime acts without direct involvement into the war.
I know he says that the Biden administration could force it, but, for the millionth time, he lies an awful lot, and never takes responsibility for anything, so it's hard to know if that's actually true.
I don't really see how you can agree with that. What is the fundamental difference between a civillian and a professional politician?
>basically just saying "Ukraine should surrender to Russia cuz it'll save lives".
I think most Ukrainians would agree with that. There's a reason, why Zelensky banned men from leaving the country, why he conduct forced conscription and why he canceled the elections. I mean, it seems like Musk voices a rather popular point of view
The United States is a representational republic. We elect people to make decisions in regards to war effort, or delegate that to certain agencies. It's not the job of civilians to take this into our own hands. When civilian does try and intervene in a war effort directly, like for example turning off communication infrastructure, that's weird. I think it's worth investigating.
There's no "difference" from, like, a DNA level if you're trying to get super-pedantic, but a professional politician is someone that we've elected to handle these kinds of situations. It's not the job of the world's richest human to arbitrarily insert themselves into it.
> I mean, it seems like Musk voices a rather popular point of view
I don't know enough about the mentalities of the Ukrainian people to say one way or another. I just thought it was weird that he started trying to intervene in the conflict and basically went public with a "compromise" that basically said to "negotiate with Russia and give them what they want".
Why is that matter? USA - is not a part of the conflict
> It's not the job of civilians to take this into our own hands
It is literally the job of civilians. In this war both sides forcefully conscripting civilians to conduct the war with their own hands
> When civilian does try and intervene in a war effort directly, like for example turning off communication infrastructure, that's weird
So you are saying that job of civilians - is to die for what the cause big politicians seems fitting them to die for, but not to try to stop this war?
> but a professional politician is someone that we've elected to handle these kinds of situations.
They obviously failed
> I don't know enough about the mentalities of the Ukrainian people to say one way or another.
Banned men's leaving, forcefull conscription and cancelled elections speaks for themselves
Yes but Elon Musk is a US citizen, which is why I brought it up.
> It is literally the job of civilians. In this war both sides forcefully conscripting civilians to conduct the war with their own hands
I'm against forced conscriptions in any capacity regardless. That doesn't justify Elon injecting himself into the conflict.
> So you are saying that job of civilians - is to die for what the cause big politicians seems fitting them to die for, but not to try to stop this war?
Elon isn't at any risk of dying from the Ukraine conflict, so it's not an apples to apples comparison, but I generally don't think civilians should be the ones to stop or start wars.
> They obviously failed
It's a complicated situation, so I don't really know how you define "failure". Moreover, there's no reason to think that Elon knows better.
> Banned men's leaving, forcefull conscription and cancelled elections speaks for themselves
I agree that all those things are bad, but I have no idea why it's Elon's job to stop it.
All of the things that matter.
Authority. Advisors. Indemnity. An army to back them up. An economy to back up the army.
If you want to draw equivalence between individuals and nations due to the things Musk has control over, then even as the richest person in the world, his entire operation is somewhere around Somalia or Malawi.
Opinions are very divided with regard to how much Musk actually listens to his advisors, but there's also no reason for him to have hired any of the people who might be relevant to this kind of question (what with them being busy advising the actual governments).
> I think most Ukrainians would agree with that. There's a reason, why Zelensky banned men from leaving the country, why he conduct forced conscription and why he canceled the elections. I mean, it seems like Musk voices a rather popular point of view
Those things are not evidence either way. Churchill did most of that (leaving the country was hard, unaffordable for most, and dangerous so not actually banned), yet very popular.
Furthermore, actual polling says that most don't even want to negotiate, and even of those who are willing to, the number willing to accept even their current territorial control as the cost of peace is tiny:
https://theconversation.com/what-latest-polling-says-about-t...
There is no actual polling. You just can't have polls when for "wrong" answers people may be imprisoned, sent to war or killed. This polls have nothing to do with reality, they only show what the government considering as the "wrong answers". So we can only judge about people's opinion by indirect evidence. And banned leaving, forced conscription and canceled elections - are pretty strong evidence
https://www.ndi.org/sites/default/files/November%202023%20wa...
They trust the armed forces and Zelensky without having to trust the government, see slide 26.
> And banned leaving, forced conscription and canceled elections - are pretty strong evidence
Churchill demonstrated otherwise.
Also, you keep saying "forced" conscriptions like conscription isn't forced by definition. And also like it's not really common when nations fear or are at war, which is why Israel and Finland also have it:
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscription_in_Finland
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscription_in_Israel
and why the US had it from 1940 until 1973: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscription_in_the_United_Sta...
You can't believe anything Elon says because he is a liar and lies "all the time", but you can can also accuse of being a Russian asset based on no evidence ?
He didn't say surrender, he said negotiate a peace deal (in Istanbul), and as controversial that was a year ago, it's clear as day today that it is correct.
https://www.politico.eu/article/ukraine-great-risk-front-lin...
Apparently the US media convinced people like you that Ukraine could actually win the war, when common sense and basic math should have shown you there was never a chance. How many innocent Ukraine were sent to the death as cannon fodder, we will never know. Musk stance was right about Ukraine, we certainly know that now.
>based on no evidence
An investigation is a process in which evidence is gathered.
> You can't believe anything Elon says because he is a liar and lies "all the time
The liar part doesn't really need me to document it, you can look at nearly any keynote he's given and see a million cases where he just makes shit up. The easiest example is him talking about when self-driving cars are going to be here, or when he says "this is something we can do now".
ETA:
It's kind of uncool to add multiple paragraphs of extra text without disclosing it.
> Apparently the US media convinced people like you that Ukraine could actually win the war,
What in the fuck are you actually talking about? It's not about "winning" or "losing", where did I say that it was about Ukraine "winning" anything?
I said it was very concerning that a civilian decided to intervene in a war effort. This isn't hard, and what you're saying is verging on dishonesty, I think because you're having trouble trying to figure out justification for Elon's actions.
I am not religious, and I don’t typically watch the news. I do not know how I am a “partisan conspiracy theorist” because I think civilians intervening in foreign conflicts should be investigated. I “enjoy life” just fine, I am just a crazy crazy person who thinks that a single unelected person should not be attempting to unilaterally make decisions involved in regards to war.
You can say something like “Tom, that’s what the US government does!” and then give me a list of articles where the US gov intervened where they shouldn’t have, but it’s not apples to apples. There’s at least an attempt at accountability for elected government officials. It’s not perfect, and I am not trying to defend awful stuff like MK Ultra, but it’s still better than being at the whim of some whiny billionaire.
And the Biden government refused to derisk things for him?
Reminiscent of George Lucas and the first Star Wars trilogy (IV-VI) versus the second (I-III): in one he had people around him pushing back (being part of a team), and the other he basically had carte blanche.
I think it's a mistake to think that most notable things are the result of "one person". Most big projects, good or bad, are a group effort, and which is why it really bothers me that people act like Elon is singularly responsible for every cool thing to come out of SpaceX or Tesla.
I've played with Markov chains, and… no. While you can totally generate some stuff with them, they're not even close to the level of ChatGPT — and ChatGPT is the reference point I use these days for "are you sure you know about this subject?", in part due to someone else describing it as "mansplaining as a service". For a lot of the stuff Musk suggests which horrifies domain experts (like how the tunnels are so narrow that if a car catches fire the people in it can't get out), what he says is stuff I'd put in this category.
But he seems to have more lucid and self-aware moments besides those, and many of which are also things which are more mocked than being horrifying (e.g. powered vertical landing to reuse rockets). It comes across to me (not a psychologist) as something of a bipolar personality — or as if some of his ideas resulted from snorting a white powdered stimulant (a category which includes caffeine, unwise as that is).
Even before ChatGPT you had things like Context Free Grammars [1] that could give results kind of like GPT, superficially. You could certainly get it to generate a bunch of sentences that could be used like business ideas. That's kind of what I was going for.
> powered vertical landing to reuse rockets
Most of your points are fair, but I reject that this is actually a clever thing on Musk's end. NASA experimented with reusable rockets in the 60's. The X-15, for example, while slightly different, demonstrates that this was something being toyed with quite awhile ago.
No doubt, SpaceX's achievement here is notable and cool, and to whatever extent Elon helped with that he deserves credit. But I think "having the idea" does not really count.
Indeed.
But between this and what you say of CFG generators, I think you misunderstood me.
He didn't just have the idea, he got it to work.
If it was just ideas that counted, I've got one for 3D printing diamond with CVD, and metal with electro-deposition, and a way to radically improve Farnsworth-type fusion.
You'll note I'm not even the most famous person with my own name, let alone for any of those things.
I guess what I was trying to say in regards to a reusable rocket is that it wasn't an idea that people laughed at. It's an idea that's pretty obvious: rockets are expensive, the way that the previous rocket stuff had worked is pretty wasteful, wouldn't it better if we can reuse more?
So hiring a bunch of engineers to build an obvious idea just doesn't impress me that much. The engineering impresses me, no doubt some very clever did something very cool, but I'm just not 100% sold that Elon deserves the lion's share of the credit on this.
And, as I stated in a sibling thread, he lies all the time. He just makes a lot of shit up. He acts like self driving cars are just around the corner, he pretends that the hyperloop is basically done, he says there's so much shit "we can do today". He calls people pedophiles if they don't want to use his stupid little submarine. There's overconfidence, and then there's grifting investors, and I think at this point it's thoroughly moved to the latter.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39991316.
Edit: I suppose I need to add that this is not a muskpoint, it's just the principle of HN to try not to repeat things this much. Especially when the repetition is indignation-fueled.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Something new on twitter breaks every week. It's wild.
There used to be a bug that wreaked havoc for a short time where you could force anybody to follow you. At the time I don't recall people blaming Twitter's leadership or culture--it was just a bug because software sometimes has bugs.
This bug has been happening since the beginning of time. I saw that constantly pre-musk
Yeah, I have. On multiple occasions before Musk took over, Twitter also had bugs.
Even if you think firing like 6/7th of Twitter's staff (or whatever) was a mistake, there's really no arguing that they're making more visible product changes than they have in years. That means that bugs happen. And frankly...proving that a tech company doesn't need that level of bloat is a valuable lesson for the entire software industry. If they overshot and have X% more bugs for now, that's fine. They'll still be dramatically leaner than before.
Yeah, this wasn't a simple staff reduction. Twitter fired something like 80% (?) of their employees. By conventional wisdom, they should have gone down hard and never recovered. There are lots of people in this comment thread who are (dubiously) trying to make the case that they did.
The Twitter example, for better or worse, revealed that tech companies are not just a little bit redundantly staffed...they're employing tons of people who effecitvely just make work for each other.
I've been arguing since the purge that Twitter was in the "Wile E Coyote ran off the cliff and is still treading air" phase, but that argument is getting harder and harder to justify as Twitter somehow stays alive. How could firing all those people really do nothing to the operational success of the company? What were they all doing? Companies don't hire people where they have nothing for them to do. I look at my (BigTech) company and everyone is running around like crazy with 3-5X more tasks in their backlog than they can possibly do. We always need more people. How do you et rid of 80% and just carry on???
* project is done to 85% effectiveness by <= 1 FTE
* company is flush with cash, and can hire someone to backfill that last 15%
* new person is not fully occupied backfilling that 15%, and therefore *finds new things to do*...which creates more projects that are done to 85% effectiveness
* goto step 1
Anyway, shovel enough money into the boiler during the "hypergrowth" phase, and you can easily end up with lots of people who are all very busy, but just not productive.
I think it's still an open question whether the business is damaged irrecoverably. I guess now they don't have the same reporting requirements, as a private company, but everything I've read suggests they're losing as much money as ever.
Although... you can certainly imagine a world where they both avoided infrastructure-death and managed to sustain the business (not pissing off advertisers, not pissing off power users, no pointless rebrands, etc).
I don't care at all, and am just reacting to the phenomenon of folks going "it's definitely worse now, and I know, because I used the product before". OK, great...I used the product before too, and don't perceive that to be true.
With this line of thinking, I could say climate change isn't happening because of the temperature outside my house.
Making visible product changes is the easiest thing to do in software.
Today the bugs are back. Things are constantly a problem. This isn't a "well all software has bugs" -- yeah true, but somehow for 7 years twitter was bug-free. Or rather the bugs were quickly caught and fixed. And now... nothing.
Musk got rid of all guardrails, and now we face the consequences.
- Twitter staff were needed - Twitter will fail if the firings continued - He just fired all these useful people
But at the end of the day, Twitter/X is still the same exact thing and runs exactly the same way. It does prove that firing all the slack can change very little but it's a good narrative to cry about Elon Musk and his "sinking soonTM ship".
I find it quite bizarre how some people still try to push some narrative about the site being broken. It's not more broken it was before the takeover outside the odd Spaces dropout (which is a new feature so doesn't really count), but is now better serving its actual mission as an actually unbiased speech platform, radical as that is in the current day. Now X just needs to stay unchanged for ten years to overcome any competition.
And now I click Install in the App Store and "something goes wrong". Simply can’t install it.
There must be UIKit people remaining at X, after all they’re updating the iOS app which must share the same code as the Mac app. But for some reason they don’t update, but leave a broken, uninstallable app on the App Store.