Even though I'm not an elon fan, pretending to not notice for political reasons (not to mention the insane halving of launches at Vandenberg AFB) is completely insane and damaging to our country.
It's something I constantly wonder about, I strongly believe we should be taxing the absolute shit out of people and working hard to flatten society, but I also worry that we need insane people in power sometimes to get stuff done. Starship (hell, even F9) is an astonishing achievement and there's zero chance that innovation would be possible anywhere except SpaceX or another entity with very strong leadership (Valve or Steve Jobs' Apple if they made rockets)
Stop apologizing for a company that let their standards slip and endangered the lives of multiple astronauts not to mention wasting billions of tax payer dollars.
https://www.businessinsider.com/spacex-employees-elon-musk-f...
>SpaceX employees say they are relieved Elon Musk is focused on Twitter because there is a calmer work environment at the rocket company
He sounds like that kind of boss we have all had where you actively avoid interacting with him because his ideas will be stupid and get your project off track. I think SpaceX succeeds despite having to deal with current Elon.
There’s also essentially zero chance his organizations succeed in spite of him. This is just wishful ignorance.
I'm very curious about this mentality.. Do you beleive that meritocracy leads to better outcomes? Why do you think that the government is better positioned to allocate resources than the people who made the money?
If Elon would have been "Taxed the absolute shit out of" after his sell of Zip 2, he wouldn't have founded paypal. too much tax on the paypal sell, he couldn't invest in Tesla or start SpaceX.
Do you believe that being rich implies merit? I would argue most exceptionally wealthy people are likely to be at or above average intelligence, but the unifying element is luck. Being in the right place at the right time with the right amount of money, and knowing the right people to bring it together.
Very few people have the means to even try to build SpaceX, so it’s hard to say how the average person measures up.
> Why do you think that the government is better positioned to allocate resources than the people who made the money?
I don’t, but I do think letting private citizens fling around “space program” quantities of money is going to end poorly. The state depends on the monopoly on violence to function, and every day we move closer to that monopoly only existing because rich private citizens choose to allow it.
Building a Rods From God platform is not out of Elons reach. I don’t think he would do it, but the potential is concerning to say the least. It would be better to reign that in before it becomes a problem than to wait until it is a problem.
But given the sheer number of projects at the companies he runs I don't find it hard to believe that he is largely not responsible for the technical successes. Again, I have no evidence for it, but it would not be hard to believe. Do you have anything other than faith for that statement?
Society devolves to status hierarchies, and the people who climb those most successfully are narcissists and sociopaths.
So there's a default assumption that you have to be that kind of crazy, glib, abusive, exploitative, bullshitter/charlatan to do remarkable things.
Occasionally you get someone who is both narcissistic and exceptionally talented. They get shit done, but they leave a trail of human wreckage behind them.
Sometimes - often - it eventually turns out that it isn't even the right shit.
Meanwhile talent that lacks that narcissistic edge is overlooked and sidelined.
This is cripplingly inefficient, because so much ability is just wasted.
And it's very literally disastrous, because crazy people can't be trusted to have a sane relationship with the physical world or with other humans.
So the problem is engineering effective hierarchies which are reality-based, have enough incentive to reward drive and talent, but exclude - or at least strongly constrain - unhealthy and toxic Cluster B types.
Easy, isn't it?
We also have pretty detailed books on the history of SpaceX, written from employee interviews, which also indicate that Musk is fairly hands on. There's also this tweet from the designer of the Merlin rocket engine that is usually thrown around when these kinds of claims are made: https://old.reddit.com/r/SpaceXMasterrace/comments/15am9pl/t...
Jeff Bezos founded Blue Origin in 2000, after revolutionizing e-commerce with Amazon.
Two years later, Elon Musk launched SpaceX in 2002, which has since surged ahead of Blue Origin.
Is that enough evidence?
Hell, let’s do a true meritocracy. Zero inheritance, zero. High quality public schools for all, homeschooling and private schools made illegal. Public and free health insurance, no private options. Keep that line of thought and you might get close to an actual meritocracy.
We wouldn't have SpaceX or Tesla with that policy.
> I genuinely believe SpaceX wouldn't be achieving nearly what it is without him
It simply wouldn't have existed without him and the conventional wisdom would instead be that what he's accomplished is impossible.
> insane people
Musk is the sane one. It's the rest of us that are insane.
Musk has not left a trail of human wreckage behind.
Yes.
For example, I've missed at least 4 opportunities to become a billionaire, because I was too stupid to see the obvious in front of my face.
I am the son of a mid-level Air Force officer, and attended public schools. After he passed I sorted through his tax records, and discovered that I made more money my first job out of college than he was making at the time at the end of his career.
Smart people make their own luck. You don't get lucky posting on the internet.
> Very few people have the means to even try to build SpaceX
Musk didn't either - he created a series of companies, each one financed by the success of the previous one.
So for that amount of money, you just killed the startup economy and killed all grand vision projects like SpaceX. Nothing gets off the ground.
Sounds very much like the socialist paradise I live in called Europe. Where the smartest most ambitious people leave for the US.
To some degree, yes. You don't get rich by being incompetent, and even if you get a headstart with an inheritance or endowment you're still going to end up broke if you can't keep making money.
>the unifying element is luck. Being in the right place at the right time with the right amount of money, and knowing the right people to bring it together.
In Japan we say that luck is just another element of your abilities. We also like saying that you don't wait for miracles, you make them yourself.
Considering that Japanese society has a fairly unambitious culture, them saying that should tell you something.
>every day we move closer to that monopoly only existing because rich private citizens choose to allow it.
The US government exists at the pleasure of the people, the US military serves in our interests at our pleasure. Government of the people, by the people, for the people as President Abraham Lincoln once said.
Americans choosing to allow the US government is the system working exactly as intended.
And now people are wondering why Musk doesn't like current administration. What a mystery.
Why would Tesla have been invited to a summit that was primarily centered around United Auto Workers? Tesla is non-union. “EV” was only a pretext.
The summit didn’t invite any non-US carmakers, who also make EVs. It was an event about UAW. Everyone invited was UAW.
The administration even said as much: https://cleantechnica.com/2021/08/05/white-house-answers-why...
It might not be, mainly because it's corrupt. Secondarily, because popular causes are not always wise. On the flip side though, in theory, government works on consensus, and making money is not the same as merit. Oftentimes, making a lot of money means you took the low road and stole it from a worthy cause, like treating your employees or customers fairly and not swindling them.
In not too many years, the light of human ingenuity will be extinguished. Elon is just in a race against time.
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man," by George Bernard Shaw.
You have no idea what the future of Tesla is and it isn't cars....
UAW will be the reason why the big 3 are all bankrupt in 10 years.
Edit: Plus, here is NASA Administrator Bill Nelson publicly congratulating SpaceX after the catch anyway: https://x.com/SenBillNelson/status/1845461454977196294
If it was a UAW event, perhaps he should have called it that and not the "EV Summit". Elon Musk has every right to be annoyed that he was not invited to such an event, although he has taken it 100x too far. But Elon Musk isn't a public official and Biden is the president. He has public duties. He ought to have been smart enough not to snub the richest man in the world, who rightfully should have been invited, over a stupid PR event.
People can be corrupt too - musk redirected Tesla resources to build his glass house
One side accuses govt of favoritism and corruption and are trying hard to make that true. The truth is most people try to do the right thing.
I think we should loosen up those rules so they can, but that does mean some people who aren't rich or sophisticated will lose their money on ill-advised startup investments.
https://qz.com/tesla-cybertruck-ford-f150-lightning-electric...
He's not doing the nitty gritty engineering day-to-day, but he understands enough to ask the right questions, give his teams permission to try ideas that seem crazy at first, and sometimes come up with those ideas himself (e.x. supposedly catching Starship with "chopsticks" was his idea).
Calling the system of lobbied-for preferences and geographic quotas built into the US immigration system "meritocracy" is...amusing.
P.S. the citizens united ruling in the US opened the floodgates for political corruption on a scale not previously possible. It's been talked about but remains unresolved.
It isn't enough to have resources in the ground. They are worth zero until extracted and turned into products and services. And for that you need technology, companies and entrepreneurs.
When you tax "the shit out of rich people" that's what you lose. You can do it exactly one time - next time you won't have what to tax.
Elon Musk is a single man. There are a million "Elon Musks" on planet Earth crushed by the oppression of the system here, who weren't fed with a golden spoon of a rich family.
In a society that provided opportunities to people that are unconnected, we would have zero reliance on such personalities.
Simply because the general population lacks the vision to understand this and accepts these sort of hacks as extraordinary, does not make it true.
SpaceX and Tesla would thrive without such narcissistic leaders.
SpaceX is doing well because of Gwynne Shotwell the COO. She's been able to keep Elon out of the weeds and basically at arms length. Let's not forget Tom Mueller who basically created the entire propulsion platform.
When Elon gets involved he makes silly things like the Cybertruck. Completely useless, poorly engineered, and overpriced garbage.
This is a problem statement not a solution. If the stat above is true, then there is obviously something very wrong with that system if they still can't out innovate us.
Modern semiconductor manufacture requires tech from the entire world. China is aiming to replicate pretty much all of it because of sanctions.
While the US and Europe are killing themselves with regulation and DEI, China has been rapidly developing every year and eventually the US is going to get a rude awakening.
And your argument about non-US carmakers makes even less sense. We're discussing the top us EV manufacturer not being invited to the "EV summit".
Please stop being so dishonest, you're lying for political bias.
Many other socialist experiments happened in the world during the last 100 years. Take your pick - they all failed miserably compared to the amazing increase in prosperity of the USA.
> The USA wouldn't suddenly turn into Venezuela
I never said that, please re-read my post.
> Netherlands, Finland, Norway [...] haven't turned into Venezuela
They haven't turn into the economic power house the US is right now either. In fact, the whole EU is waking up to the fact that they're being left behind.
And they haven't "taxed the hell out of rich people", just slightly more. But coupled with just slightly more regulation, turns out the more socialism you impose on your economy, the less competitive it is.
And we're talking about much smaller countries, too - but not that flat actually. Sweden is ahead and Norway is just 3 spots behind USA in the billionaires-per-capita ranking, with Finland and Netherlands not that far behind.