And not an eccentric recluse like Ted Kaczynski:
Musk tweeted "He might not be wrong" about Kaczynski so maybe it's in progress.
His political and economic opinions are pretty bad. He should just shut up.
https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/mars-terraforming-not-poss...
Note the date on that: it was published in Nature on July 30 2018, and it wouldn't surprise me if somebody would've sent a preprint to Musk up to a month before then. The "pedo guy" tweet during the Thai cave rescue was July 18 2018. Musk's "funding secured" Tweet that the SEC sanctioned him over was Aug 7 2018. His appearance on the Joe Rogan podcast was September 2018. Most of his children and extramarital affairs post-date 2018; at that point, he only had the 5 with Justine Musk. Pre-2018, most of his ideas were crazy but at least engineering-focused on reasonable causes.
Musk has repeatedly said his ambition is to die on Mars. After a reputable scientific paper came out saying that if you step off Starship, that will be the very first thing you do, he doesn't really have anything to live for. Meanwhile he's given up so much for that goal (most notably, his first family) that it must feel pretty bitter to have invested so much in something impossible.
For that matter, the psychology is likely pretty similar to the core MAGA demographic, many of whom work hard all their life to achieve the American Dream and then find that the American Dream is going to other people.
Also, impossible with current technology doesn't mean that it's impossible in the future.
He actually talked about this on his latest Diablo stream, here: https://youtu.be/wzIJDU8SPMM?t=2066 He seems to think that terraforming is possible in the long term, with solar reflectors in the orbit which warm up the planet.
This paywall is crazy.
Being a billionaire makes pivoting to executing on new dreams easier.
Newfound empathy could give him a new dream of making that American Dream happen for others.
Not least, terraforming would take centuries in any plausible effort. If he goes to Mars to die, he'll die in a pressurised environment whatever happens.
I think his behavior is just the consequence of his wealth and success, of being literally at the top of the world in terms of money. And especially because his money comes from SpaceX and Tesla, both of which were considered crazy and impossible enterprises by most people (and there were many people people saying that it all will fail well before he became really famous and really rich). So I think he just started believing that since he was right with SpaceX and Tesla, and others were wrong (and he became the world's wealthiest person because he was right, so he was in a certain capitalistic way more right than literally everyone), he is right about everything and can do everything. And he was always kind of crazy.
Politically I think that maybe his actions are somewhat calculated, maybe he's predicting that Trump will win and be more willing to finance crazy big missions to space? Right now Tesla isn't dependent on American environmental programs as much as it was before, and SpaceX is in a position in which they'll get government contracts forever, no matter who's in power, so he doesn't need to please the current government. And I think he was always more of a libertarian, so that checks out with many things he's saying. His "anti-war" views can also be explained by desire to minimize the risk of closing that window in which Mars colonization is possible.
Why not see what we can do about Earth so it might be livable 100 years from now?
Naah, lets spend all our money on a desolate frozen rock 140 million miles away.
Many public figures just copy popular opinions and present them as their own precisely so that most people will like them. They haven't even tried to understand what they're talking about. At least Musk has some understanding and isn't driven by conformity.
God, I fucking hope not. I'm just a single individual, just a man. No different than anyone else here.
I think Musk's political/economic opinions are awful because he's so far abstracted away from the real world that his opinions are effectively worthless. I wouldn't trust a random homeless guy's opinion much like I wouldn't trust Jeff Bezos' or Elon Musk's opinions - they both represent an extreme of how thing ares, but no way would they represent how society should move forward.
At least Musk's opinions aren't just a carbon copy of whatever's popular at the time. That alone makes them at least potentially worth something. The celebrities who can only repeat what they're supposed to say to make themselves look good are the ones who should shut up. Their stated opinions are simply whatever they think will serve their popularity.
He got lucky with PayPal, and lucky with Tesla. That's it. He is not the president, he is not god, not allah, not yahweh, the flying spaghetti monster, he is just a man that got incredibly wealthy both through his own intelligence and some good fortune. That does not mean he's qualified to opine on something outside of his area of expertise.
Would you trade your ability to speak publicly about things you don't really understand in depth in exchange for 100 billion dollars? I sure would. Give me 1/100th of that and I'm off to a private island to read books and grow my own food.
Say what you will about Musk, he's no Trump. At least, not yet. He hasn't alienated that many people, and even if he were to do so, it wouldn't be enough to impact Tesla's sales.
What about, without Elon they'd have reusable rockets but without Shotwell they wouldn't? Do you believe this?
I get you hate Elon but at some point these takes are just so outrageous I can't believe you are making them in good faith.
Which contribution do you believe that Elon Musk had on the development of reusable rockets?
Let's put it this way: if you kicked Musk out of SpaceX and replaced it with absolutely any random guy as CEO, do you believe reusable rockets would never see the light of day?
In the USA you have the SLS, which can only be described as a congressionally designed failure.
Past experiments by NASA for self landing rockets had their funding denied as well.
In the EU there was the Arianespace CEO who explicitly said that self landing rockets were a waste of time.
In Japan, space experimentation and failures are such a public nightmare we would never have bothered.
The idea of losing dozens of rockets in order to aim for reusability would have been untenable.
Starship would not exist. Because the idea of a rocket with that many engines on the booster was also believed to be impractical.
Elon is egomaniacal sure, but that's only magnified by his status as a CEO. His behavior, unfortunately pretty close to the average person.
Doesn't change the fact that SpaceX under his leadership is the only reason we have reusable rockets, or the ridiculously ambitious Starship launches.
No one could have predicted the current incredible cadence of launches by SpaceX either.
He is a constant technical driving force.
> if you kicked Musk out of SpaceX and replaced it with absolutely any random guy as CEO, do you believe reusable rockets would never see the light of day?
Would we have reusable rockets in the same timeline as SpaceX, absolutely not. The proof is all the other rocket companies that have failed to do so, including government entities.
So yah obviously if Musk never founded SpaceX, we would not have reusable rockets right now.
Any time prior to ~2014, absolutely.
Correct.
You don't need a hypothetical, it's not like SpaceX is the first rocket making entity in the world. Why were all your darlings incapable? SpaceX didn't invent a new branch of rocketry after all. And they hired from the pool of engineers who could have and did work at all the other rocket companies.
How did this same pool of scientists and engineers end up with a viable reusable rocket with 300+ successful landings only when they came together at SpaceX?
I get you love Elon, but as some point you need to look in the mirror and recognize your sycophancy for what it is.
What do you think the word "nothing" means?
You can’t honestly say he founded that company.
I think you are just as biased as the parent comment if you think one failure invalidates the merit of all previous successes.
If you talk to actual employees, especially early and senior employees, you find that Elon Musk is absolutely pivotal to the engineering direction.
Calling SpaceX Gwynne’s baby is just straight up misinformation. Talk to actual employees from SpaceX, especially early on. They’ll tell you that Musk actually does get involved in various deep aspects of the vehicles. You might not be aware, but Gwynne Shotwell was in BD not product.
All signs point to "no". We know this, because of what the Tesla and SpaceX people he brought on to Twitter in early days after the acquission said. I believe the words were, "babysit", "distract", and "manage".
I'm sure some fanboy will mark me down, but this was discussed on this very forum when it happened.
He probably takes his rocket knowledge and under-estimates software complexity.
I think he’s probably a smart guy who’s worked hard to learn as much as possible about the fields he’s entered into, but I find it hard to believe that he’s a world-leading technical mind at either. The reason he’s struggling comparatively with Twitter is partly that he doesn’t take it seriously, and partly that he has other ambitions for it (“X the everything app”) than what it actually is.
The main attributes behind his success are his obsessive desire to achieve certain goals, and his willingness to take on a very large amount of risk over and over again (he could easily have gone bankrupt several times, but so far things have mostly gone his way).
Edit: Another reason he’s had a tough time with Twitter is that he’s acted out of spite and alienated people and organizations he should have been on good terms with, mainly advertisers (Twitter’s actual customers).
Karpathy: https://old.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1bpwo0w/andrej...
Tom Mueller: https://i.redd.it/89dqiz2lc2t81.jpg
Or even Shotwell herself for that matter and how she has expressed how she and Elon subdivide the work.
Elon Musk is not nice person, but he gets things done and he's deeply involved in the day-to-day activities of his companies. I know a low level software engineer at SpaceX and he regularly attends their team meetings and contributes.
You say that like its a good thing. Normally CEO attending random low level meetings is considered a pretty big red flag.
If you want to run an IBM or Cisco, don't hire Musk, sure.
Altman just did a big deal with Apple.
Musk's board is still likely to cram through a $45B+ comp package for him.
Musk has a reputation as being too demanding, which is one thing if you are doing something revolutionary, but nowadays the market has mostly caught up to his cars. It seems all that over-working his employees has done is produced poor QA.
He’s also politically alienating to liberals, who would otherwise be inclined to buy his cars.
Also, would love to hear your definition of who is and who isn't "liberal".
Remember kids, the left/right & liberal/conservative is a completely false dichotomy.
Of course it's alienating to ordinary people.
This is why you got movements like social liberalism, to try to temper the madness and turn into something less socially useless, but everything moves back towards its origin, so here in Europe even once reasonably decent social liberal parties have now decayed into liberal parties, into the inherently alienating position that is liberalism's core.
I suppose now neither of them is a free party anymore at least, and I suppose both are landowner's parties.
Not sure I'd classify either of those as "image".
did Altman do it?
Musk on the other hand has built things. People can disparage him all they want, but I think every one of us is better off for tesla, neuralink, spacex and even the boring company and paypal. who cares if he opens his mouth on social media.
I mean, he went to russia to launch a rocket, figured out they were a mess, came back and... several years later the world is launching rockets all the time. (It's june 11, and just starlink launched 4 rockets since the beginning of the month)
The rocket stuff is like the rise of pc hardware, where things start happening faster and all of a sudden, commercial flights are putting people in space.
I kind of think openai got off mission, and won't be as good for everyone, except maybe in the sense that other folks like meta have opened up models like llama.
None of those make me better off in any way. Some (neuralink, the boring company) have never made anyone better off except maybe in some pilot program.
Tesla might not be your favorite car, but it has created robust competition in EVs, and made the incumbent car manufacturers have to compete.
Someday if you need internet in your cabin or RV, starlink made it easier even if you don't use them.
How does starlink existing make it more likely for other companies to build expensive infrastructure while having to price compete with it?
If you've ever looked at satellite internet, hughes was not affordable, and very slow. Now starlink has shaken things up, and it is even fast enough to do real work.
If anything, Musk getting a $45B package after a year of failures and layoffs at Tesla is something that tarnishes Musk and Tesla's image. The fact that this cash package is almost exactly what he owes creditors for the loans he took out buying Twitter, it almost looks like he's begging Tesla for an undo button for his own terrible decisions.
As for Apple making a deal with OpenAI, the fact that every product integrating ChatGPT is just being ruthless enshittified as a result, this is terrible optics for Apple when their biggest competitor, Microsoft, is currently playing target practice with its feet shipping poorly advised AI integrations (see: Recall).
As for OpenAI's image, the only thing they have going for them is the technical impressiveness of ChatGPT - organizationally everyone I know in the tech space assumes that OpenAI is a dumpster fire of a company.
I hate to defend executive comp, but Tesla’s market cap has gone up by $487 billion (almost 10x) since he was awarded that comp package in 2018. Half of all EVs sold in the US are Teslas. In 2023, the Model Y was the world’s bestselling car, outselling the Toyota Corolla. That’s completely insane. What more do you want?
I believe in honouring deals, even if it’s unsavoury ex post facto. Until recently, that meant approving the pay package.
But Musk unilaterally amended the deal when he “threatened on X…to develop AI elsewhere if he doesn’t get a 25% stake in Tesla” [1]. Then he developed AI elsewhere [2]. If you promise to give me a dollar, you dither, I say I’ll burn your house down if you don’t, and then I burn your house down, I don’t believe you owe me the dollar anymore.
Musk should offer to return xAI’s funding and merge it into Tesla in exchange for the vote.
[1] https://apnews.com/article/tesla-elon-musk-pay-package-share...
Another way to think about this is that investors are in a position where they got that wildly ambitious growth, and are currently not obligated to pay for it, so why would they? This is to the guy that has no problems breaking contracts of his own, and gives the finger to people he owes money to.
I guess we'll see when this comes to a vote, but it would be shrewd business not to.
This situation, though, has a different set of forward-looking concerns. Musk already has several other jobs. And the primary concern is that he wants this large pay package so that he can have more personal resources to put toward those other jobs (at the expense of Tesla).
As it stands now, Musk’s personal financial position depends on leverage against his Tesla position. This binds him to Tesla’s future performance. Giving him a huge personal pay package essentially weakens that binding, giving him greater license to deprioritize his Tesla leadership in favor of SpaceX, Xai, Neuralink, etc.
There is an argument to be made that Tesla’s board should be essentially antagonistic toward Musk’s other companies, given that his time and attention are finite resources, and Tesla is a public company. The board has responsibilities to investors to maximize their return, which should take precedence over whatever feelings of gratitude or connection they feel toward Musk personally.
If anyone took away a software engineers options here after a company became successful because the company later decided it's too much there'd be hell to pay. Everyone rightfully complained about Zynga doing this.
But here it's fine? Bullshit. I voted to pay the man his due. I voted to move the corp out of Delaware to Texas. He made me money under reasonable terms. Back then everyone said he'd just fail.
b) Stop devaluing the Tesla brand with his controversial, inflammatory comments.
c) Compensation package that is more reasonable compared with other companies.
The speculation on Tesla's stock raised the "market cap". Any stock that Tesla doesn't own brings Tesla exactly 0 dollars, no matter how hight the illusionary market cap there is.
How much of the stock does Tesla actually own? How much of the stock that Tesla owns can the company safely sell to offset the $45 billion of actual money that they had to cough up for Elon?
https://ir.tesla.com/press-release/tesla-announces-new-long-...
That would require either of them to be good at building anything, and I don't think either has ever demonstrated that. They're just money men, and Musk went out of his way to PR himself as the real life Iron Man before utterly ruining it because he can't shut his mouth when he really, really should.
So what's your space company called?
You're off by an order of magnitude on the start-up capital SpaceX drew, and that almost exclusively from Musk.
He wrote some code back in the 90's and there's no evidence he's done any actual work since then. His job is to be rich, and write checks. Anyone can do that. I wrote a check this morning.
Well, that and going on Joe Rogan to get high and crash the stock price of his companies. I could do that too I suppose but I'd prefer not to.
Nope. Can’t speak for the other companies, but he was in the design room and on the factory floor making changes at SpaceX.
I can't imagine a future where AI is only controlled by the powerful and wealthy.
Honestly, we take many of the great things we have thanks to FOSS for granted and come to think of it, if those were to be invented today, they would be locked behind a subscription fee or entirely discontinued because VC's couldn't figure out how to make money from them.
Sure, it's nowhere near the amount of knowledge as Claude Sonnet / Opus, or the suite of GPT 4s, but when you hook it up to external sources of knowledge, it's still freaking useful.
No need to imagine. It’s already here. Look at all the open weight models - all big corporate developed and then shared because it suited their corporate objectives.
There is not a hint of FOSS like organic model development in sight. On the technique and research yes but not on the actual training.
It’s too expensive and thus automatically limited to big tech and gov
They'd do much better if they just shut up & built...something they're both clearly good at