Certainly, our experience could be an anomalous. But I certainly hear this happening all the time with Tesla, with the manufacturer trying to void warranties and evade liability for vehicle defects.

I just.. wouldn't be bullish on any of Elon's companies in a crowded market; which I suspect will define more his companies in the future. His politically obtuse behavior and lack of respect for authority is enough to turn off ethically minded consumers; and that's before the general crummy experience of being his customer. My best friend has a Honda EV that broke down twice, one time being potentially out of warranty-and the dealer repaired it, no questions asked

It's like trying to diagnose WiFi next to a radar station remotely when you don't know the user is next to one

Just pointing out that there's things you can't diagnose without being physically present. And these kinds of issues aren't only existent in Telecoms or SATCOM in particular.

The user should ask for a credit/refund. The product was almost certainly working. But not meeting expectations. If not it wouldn't have been on for 8 months. Can't tell me you ran 0 bytes over it

Sometimes I come here for a good laugh

Its pretty clear that the all-too-common in space and time hierarchies, oligarchies, command-and-control pyramids etc. rely on trickle-down privilege to sustain.

But the feeligs of disgust and disbelief at how a person can diminish themselves in the hope of some crumbs falling their way must also have strong evolutionary basis?

The OP said “the most successful businessman in the world”.

Sure one can argue about how OP came to that conclusion, by what measure, etc, but the man produced a highly successful car company, in a field nobody has really been able to do it, under terms where everyone was counting down the days until it went bankrupt.

That alone is an amazing feat.

Then he went on to create a rocket company that broke barriers of space travel no one has been able to do.

Then he started a satellite company that pushed the boundaries of communication for the average person.

I’d say all those feats are worthy of praise and make him a person who stands out significantly from any other businessman in recent history.

So saying he’s the “most successful businessman” doesn’t seem like an absurd or overly hyperbolic statement.

And how you got “stroking off” or the even more absurd “bootlicking” from that statement is just bizarre. I saw zero evidence of either.

I’d say your comments are the odd ones here and say more about you than the OP.

The Economist made a feeble effort to rank countries in this respect [3] but it does not even include the tech sector in the "crony-prone" sectors (eyes rolling).

[1] "situation in which businesses profit from a close relationship with state power, either through an anti-competitive regulatory environment, direct government largesse, and/or corruption. Examples given for crony capitalism include obtainment of permits, government grants, tax breaks, or other undue influence from businesses over the state's deployment of public goods, for example, mining concessions for primary commodities or contracts for public works" etc.

[2] Crony Capitalism, American Style: What Are We Talking About Here? https://www.hbs.edu/ris/Publication%20Files/15-025_c6fbbbf7-...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crony-capitalism_index

No, actually the burden is on the person making that claim (you).

Now that you’ve brought up political money and public and private interests, I’m starting to think you don’t like his politics and that’s about it.

I can think of any other business who doesn’t spend millions for politics and “commingle public and private interests” (whatever that actually means).

"Crony capitalism, sometimes also called simply cronyism, is a pejorative term used in political discourse to describe a situation in which businesses profit from a close relationship with state power, [...] In other words, it is used to describe a situation where businesses thrive not as a result of free enterprise, but rather collusion between a business class and the political class."

> I can think of any other business who doesn’t spend millions for politics and “commingle public and private interests”

So if cronyism is prevalent in US to some degree then a person who does that best shouldn't be criticisized?

You realize that prior to the latest election, the government generally was opposed to Elon Musk. He was investigated by the SEC, and attacked by politicians.

That sounds like the opposite of crony capitalism.

> So if cronyism is prevalent in US to some degree then a person who does that best shouldn't be criticisized?

Maybe you should start with some evidence first? Honestly, it sounds like you just don't like him and you're mad that others do like him.

And who knows what happened around starlink and military.

Tons of subsidies for Tesla. Tax cuts. All of his companies benefit hugely from tax money yet people see him as incredible self made billionaire.

Look closer into how the sausage is made. For example the Moon grant for SpaceX to the tune of about $3bln was awarded by a person who wrote it in first person singular and after she did it, she promptly quit and went to work for SpaceX.

Musk is definitely successful, but a grifter not a businessman.

> [...] man produced a highly successful car company

Musk is claiming to posess and even selling non-existent technology to both investors and consumers (pre-orders never fullfilled) for almost a decade now. Other people (Theranos, Nikola) who tried to replicate his success in this field but didn't have pants padded with hundred bln$ are curretly serving very long prison sentences for investor fraud. While Musk got off on the grounds that what he says is widely known to be pure puffery and no-one of sound mind should expect what he says to be accurate. Funny how billions "in the bank" can change how justice percieves you.

Musk is now basically so full of hot air that when he stumbles he falls up.

I do know we didn’t have self-landing rockets nor a massive reduced cost of space cargo until SpaceX.

Whether Musk hired the author of a Moon grant is irrelevant to that fact.

Same with Tesla. We had multiple, massively funded car companies try and fail to mass produce an electric car consumers wanted

Whether Musk overpromises FSD isn’t relevant to that accomplishment.

Many smart people make things happen all the time. Regardless of whether there's some singular rich grifter in that specific that can latch onto them soon enough to claim credit or not.

And regardless I made no claim that any of those other things aren’t important, so feel free to knock down your own strawman.

That latching onto smart people and ousting them out of their own achievements and replacing with yourself in public imagination is something to admire.

Your own bias is showing.

You've provided zero evidence to back of your claims of "grifter" (whatever that is).

It's not hard. Businessmen run businesses. Musk runs many and in a very successful way. You're entitled to your own opinions, but that's what they are - nothing more than your opinions.

I suppose it’s some deep personality trait difference that makes us right wingers appreciate his work and what makes leftists hate his guts.

You're ranking Musk above Jobs, Ford, Rockefeller, Carnegie, Disney, Toyoda, Walton, and Buffett?

Edit: should add that Elon is still valued at a good percentage of the US gdp. So, not unreasonable to say that is incomprehensible, as well. By that measure, is similar to Rockefeller, I think.

Look, Elon is worth a lot. Walton family is worth as much, as well. Just split among several people. None of which should be scoffed at. None are made more impressive by pretending the others are less.

The Walton estate now is worth over $350b, but it’s not a fair comparison as it’s had much longer to compound.

The other thing is that while SpaceX is incredibly successful, the other companies he’s started aren’t. Tesla (despite its massive growth) is in a market of rapidly growing competitors, and he’s on record saying the company lives or dies on tech his own engineers have suggested in court isn’t coming (FSD).

Put another way, if in 30 years Musk has 10 trillion in wealth would seem, to me, to be much less relevant than if he succeeds in making humanity a permanently multi-planetary species.

Advancing humanity in so many different revolutionary fields all at once is something that had not been achieved in a very long time.

Why is a company worth more today than it was five years ago?

Because it's generating more revenue, has more assets... is better at doing whatever {company thing} is.

One can argue that (a) {company thing} isn't good for humanity at all and/or (b) a company which generates more money isn't really more successful, but merely a side effect of capitalist valuing.

And maybe...

But I'd say there's a pretty strong argument that Buffett is worth what he is because BH made multiple companies very much better at doing what they do. In the same way that Ford or Walton made their money by building companies that did what they did better.

And I'd add in the perspective that science and discovery without engineering into mass application is... a hobby with limited impact. The real litmus test is "Can you use this to improve many people's lives?"

And when you do that in a capitalist society, you usually have a chance to make a lot of money.

If we look at valuations, then yeah. If we look at how much money all of his ventures make ? The picture is very different.

SpaceX - may or may not be profitable in the last year - it's hard to know. Until recently definitely no profitable

Tesla - really profitable since 2021, with great 2022 / 2023. Trending in the wrong direction recently

Twitter, xAI, boring, neuralink - all are money furnaces.

SpaceX is very much in the same position as early Amazon.

If they wanted to, they could be profitable today. But they are investing heavily in the future.

IMO, that's a good sign for SpaceX. Many large companies have run out of ideas of what to do with money, so they accumulate it in bank accounts, or do dividends/stock buybacks.

I don't think that starlink's support or documentation is particularly great, but it still seems better than my experiences will cell phone and internet service providers.

Internet provision not all that far out of major Australian cities can be abysmal. I'm only 30 minutes drive from the centre of Perth and my options are currently 5G (operating at about 4Mbit), Wireless Broadband (performance promise - the download speed will reach 25Mbit at least once in any given 24 hour period!) or Starlink, at a pretty stable 120/20.

I'd love to not have to pay for it, to use what local/national companies can provide, but so far nothing comes close.

I am informed that the wireless system is due to be upgraded to support much higher speeds, but that was supposed to happen this year and there's not a lot of this year left.

At least in part that's been delayed because of someone in the area raising a band of nutters and giving the council hell about 5G killing her grandchildren. Sigh.

Might happen before too much longer - she managed to get the project to build the new antenna on private land killed (I'm sure much to the annoyance of the landowner, who was going to pocket a nice chunk of ground-rent). But now the local authority have given the go-ahead for one to be built on their land, and they're going to get the rent. She is apoplectic, which brings me great joy.

TIO membership, the carrier licence fee, telecommunications interception and data retention obligations create recurring costs in the thousands of dollars a year before you serve a single customer.

I know of companies that set up competing wireless infrastructure, and even one suburb around here that is served by a private network rather than the national network, so I guess they did it, but they have (at minimum) hundreds of customers.

At that price I might be looking at $1k-$2k just in fibre-optic cable, before we talk about any of the necessary equipment or the price of actually installing that cable underground. That covers starlink for quite a while.

One my colleagues tried Starlink at his cabin in the PNW and he had to return it. He just couldn't get a clear and wide enough line of sight through the tree cover. I wonder if that was your issue?

Musk is famous for being contemptuous of his employees, and he's starting to show more and more contempt for Rest of World. Cybertruck and X both reek of it.

Everyone here is assuming Musk is rational and SpaceX and Starlink will continue to develop rationally.

I don't think they will. He appears to be becoming more and more unhinged, and that's going to have negative effects on his fledgling empire.

* Mbps

Yep. Tesla infamously doesn't have a Public Relations department ( I assume because he got rejected by a woman who worked there) and

“[email protected] now auto responds with [poop emoji],” Musk tweeted.

Ladies and gentlemen, the richest man in the world!

Personally, I monitored latency more than speed, as I always had enough speed to do whatever I wanted. When I first started using SL, latency averaged around 100ms (which compared to my previous provider HughesNet was amazing, but was high compared to ground based connections), but today averages around 35ms which is still technically higher than ground based connections, but for all practical purposes for me, is indisguishable from any other internet option, even for online gaming and live video streaming.

Although I did not monitor speed as regurarily, it averages around 300Mbps for me. Sometimes it exceeds 400Mbps (I just ran a speed test and got 420Mbps), and it is rarely less than 100Mbps.

I have contacted support twice, and always received quick replies. However, based on my monitoring the Starlink Reddit forum, customer support during their beta period did appear to have often been poor. And there was also a period of time where performance was poor in many populated regions as they started opening up the floodgates a bit sooner than they probably should have, resulting in slow speeds for people in many regions, until their satellite launches caught up to demand.

However, my impression is that both of these issues have improved significantly since Starlink left beta. I do still see some complaints about customer service, but anecdotally it appears less frequent. My impression is that they have the ability to remotely troubleshoot many hardware issues, and will quickly send a replacement if they can confirm a fault. I do worry about this though, as even a quick reply and a quick hardware replacement means several days of downtime.

Speed complaints are almost certainly less frequent than they used to be.

I have no doubt that your customer service hell story is true, and if that happened to me I would be just as turned off, but I think that, especially today, that is not the norm.

I have considered purchasing a spare terminal as a backup, but I do have some concerns. I have heard that terminals that stay unpowered and unconnected for very long periods of time get too behind on FW updates and essentially become bricked, I don't believe that is the case today but I am not 100% sure. Also, back when there used to be a queue for signing up, it would not have been practical to just set up a new account for the new terminal, but now that the sign up queue is gone, maybe it is an option today. I have not fully researched my options for this redundancy idea.