I find it curious Musk was able to snif out SBF as a bullshit artist in his 30 min. Meeting with him, whereas countless polititions and regulators aparently did not have a clue despite years of meetings and other contacts.
What a bunch of BS. It's obviously easy to say that in hindsight. There are a million reasons for why he did not take the investment, but in none of the published conversation was anything about him thinking SBF is lying. In fact, knowing Elon, if he had really said that at some point before FTX collapsed, he sure would have published it by now to prove how smart he is.
He was skeptical even though SBF wanted to give him money, not the other way around. And people Elon knew were pushing for SBF. Elon ended up ghosting him anyway. Look at the chat logs that were revealed in court.
Michael Grimes [IBanker at Morgan Stanley]: Do you have 5 minutes to connect on possible meeting tomorrow I believe you will want to take?
Elon: I'm backlogged with a mountain of critical work
matters. ls this urgent?
Michael: Wants 1-Sb. Serious about partner w/you. Same security you own
Michael: Not urgent unless you want him to fly tomorrow. He has a window tomorrow then he's wed-Friday booked
Michael: Could do $5bn if everything vision lock. Would do the engineering for social media blockchain integration. Founded FTX crypto exchange. Believes in your mission. Major Democratic donor. So thought it was potentially worth an hour tomorrow a la the Orlando meeting and he said he could shake hands on 5 if you like him and I think you will. Can talk when you have more time not urgent but if tomorrow works it could get us $5bn equity in an hour
Elon: Blockchain twitter isn't possible, as the bandwidth and latency requirements cannot be supported by a peer to peer network, unless those "peers" are absolutely gigantic, thus defeating the purpose of a decentralized network.
Elon: ["disliked" "Could do $5bn ..."]
Elon: So long as I don't have to have a laborious blockchain debate
Elon: Strange that Orlando declined
Elon: Please let him know that I would like to talk and understand why he declined
Elon: Does Sam actually have $3B liquid?
Michael: I think Sam has it yes. He actually said up to 10 at one point but in writing he said up to 5. He's into you. And he specifically said the blockchain piece is only if you liked it and not gonna push it. Orlando referred Sams interest to us and will be texting you to speak to say why he (Orlando) declined. We agree orlando needs to call you and explain given everything he said to us and you. Will make that happen We can push Sam to next week but I do believe you will like him. Ultra Genius and doer builder like your formula. Built FTX from scratch after MIT physics. Second to Bloomberg in donations to Biden campaign.
Will MacAskill [co-creator of effective altruism movement, Oxford professor, Chair of board for Global Priorities Institute at Oxford]: Hey - I saw your poll on twitter about Twitter and free speech. I'm not sure if this is what's on your mind, but my collaborator Sam Bankman-Fried (https://www.forbes.com/profile/sam-bankman-fried/?sh=4de9866...) has for a while been potentially interested in purchasing it and then making it better for the world. If you want to talk with him about a possible joint effort in that direction, his number is [redacted] and he's on Signal.
Elon: Does he have huge amounts of money?
Will: Depends on how you define "huge"! He's worth $24B, and his early employees (with shared values) bump that to $30B. I asked about how much he could in principle contribute and he said: "~$1-3b would be easy-$3-8b I could do ~$8-15b is maybe possible but would require financing"
Will: If you were interested to discuss the idea I asked and he said he'd be down to meet you in Austin
Will: He's based in the Bahamas normally. And I might visit Austin next week, if you'd be around?
Will: That's a start
Will: Would you like me to intro you two via text?
> Elon: Blockchain twitter isn't possible, as the bandwidth and latency requirements cannot be supported by a peer to peer network, unless those "peers" are absolutely gigantic, thus defeating the purpose of a decentralized network.
Anyone able to evaluate this comment? Is this another "poorly batched 1000 RPCs slowing down home timeline" remark?
It's true, and the RPC comment is also very plausible
It's definitely not as ridiculous as what lots of experienced engineers are oddly saying
e.g. simply open up Twitter in Chrome's devtools and look at the networking tab -- I get 148 requests that finish in 6.3 seconds
That is very plausibly "1000 poorly batched RPCs" that makes Twitter slow in other countries -- if it's 6 seconds for me, it's easily 20, 30, or 60 seconds for others
It will be shocking to me if some executive attention on latency can't halve it, in short order. The problem with latency is that no one team is in charge of it -- every team is incentivized to use as much latency budget as possible to ship their feature.
Larry Page harped on at this at Google for a decade, until he kind of gave up / moved on, and Google became nearly as slow as every other website.
So Elon is absolutely doing the right thing with respect to latency -- he's not wrong, and he's not micro-managing.
----
Yes Elon is not infallible -- he made flatly wrong claims about self-driving for years, despite experts in the field telling him otherwise, to his financial benefit. And Tesla is being rightly investigated for those claims (years too late, probably)
It doesn't mean that Twitter isn't slow as hell for extremely basic reasons
I made a similar comment on Reddit and got voted down because Elon fanboyism has apparently turned into Elon hate. People really love to "pick a side" and ignore the facts on the ground.
Simple changes like enabling HTTP/3 and IPv6 would dramatically improve performance in locations outside of the United States. Google developed those specifically to work around performance issues in places like India, or mobile networks pretty much anywhere. Since Twitter is mobile-first, it surprises me they haven't jumped on board with these kinds of advancements.
What were all those thousands of people doing over there!?
Theoretical TPS limit for mainnet and L2s isn't enough to support the scale of twitter. The writes will get expensive very fast unless you offload that and only send a batched proof. Putting actual content on blockchain is a non-starter as well.
Most of the blockchain based social graphs end up using centralized indexer.
Everyone is also dependent on centralized RPC providers for querying and sending transactions since it requires a lot of resources to maintain your own.
So peer to peer isn't possible at their scale depending on how you interpret it.
Think we need to take that with a massive pinch of salt - Musk only came out and said that after the whole thing blew up. The actual contemporaneous messages are simply that SBF wanted block-chain twitter and Musk didn't. It's easy for all the SV people who didn't work with SBF to come out and act the genius now, but it's a bit self-serving.
Yeah that never happened. The only thing clear from those messages was that he wanted the money and was simply asking if the guy was good for the cash.
Musk and the religion that's built up around him in recent years exist in two separate realities.
Just to explain as someone that was initially a fan of Musk but now highly critical of him:
SpaceX owes a great deal of it's success to the people around Elon, particularly Shotwell, minimizing his bad behaviors. Compare this to Tesla and now Twitter, where Elon has unilateral power. At the first he managed to get in trouble with the SEC in the dumbest way possible, as well as continues the Fully Self Driving saga that many of us regard as fraud, the solar tiles debacle, etc. At the latter he's treating employees in an utterly reprehensible and illegal way. He's currently under investigation for similar behaviors at Tesla but involving far fewer employees.
The left hates Elon more for his union busting and abusive labor practices than bad jokes, but bad jokes certainly don't help Elon any when it comes to PR.
I can give Elon credit for advancing the timelines of both EVs and solar power, and applaud SpaceX for their innovation, while also being highly critical of Elon's general behavior and treatment of the people who work for them.
Put more bluntly: I AM judging Elon on the basis of his actions. Your position is actually that SpaceX is so cool it forgives all wrongs.
The EV industry as well as the spacetech industry would have none of the momentum they currently have if there was no messianic figure like Musk leading the pack.
Industries need charismatic evangelists to attract capital. Musk made investing in serious hardware ventures cool.
Now all the billionaires have their own space companies just to compete with Musk.
All in, a net positive. Otherwise Bezos billions might have gone into yet another superyacht.
If you get an abrasive personality with it, that’s a decent bargain.
> Now all the billionaires have their own space companies just to compete with Musk.
Do they? The only other billionaire-owned space company that comes to mind is Blue Origin, but they were founded years before SpaceX. (Which incidentally, seems to debunk the common argument that any billionaire funding a space program would have success similar to SpaceX/Musk. If success with such funding were inevitable, Blue Origin would have gotten to orbit years ago but in reality they still haven't.)
People are acting towards him like that exactly because they praised him before and were holding him at high esteem. I certainly did. Now he started to disappoint people, multiple times.
Nobody cares (much) about CEO of Comcast, or BP, or Electronic Arts. They have bad reputation and when they do something bad again, people just shrug and move on. While people with good reputation doing same things are discussed a lot.
Also note that Comcast, BP, EA etc. are all successful businesses. They just shitty to humans, but successful. So founding a big successful technology company is a big achievement, but not a unique one.
Founding multiple big successful companies in nascent industries that had been starved of capital before is a unique AND big achievement.
Nobody cheers on Bezos because of Blue Origin. They praise him for building Amazon when e-commerce was still new (or when dot coms had gone out of favor).
Same with Musk. There are multiple major private space ventures now. Ever car company has a heavily funded EV division. When Musk started, EVs were considered a joke and private space tech had little to no capital.
Musk is unique because he put his money into industries no big money would touch before him.
I honestly think they would, if Blue Origin actually did anything worth cheering. Their best achievement so far is stalling ULA's Vulcan Centaur for years. By the time it flies it will most likely be utterly obsolete, because Blue Origin has fumbled the BE-4 severely. Vulcan Centaur was supposed to fly in 2019 but Blue Origin only delivered some engines about a few weeks ago. They're years late and it's hurting ULA badly. Because of Blue Origin, SpaceX's Starship will probably fly before Vulcan Centaur. Vulcan Centaur is meant to be a HLV marginally more performant than Falcon 9, but Starship should wipe the floor with both.
>Also note that Comcast, BP, EA etc. are all successful businesses. They just shitty to humans, but successful. So founding a big successful technology company is a big achievement, but not a unique one.
What nonsense. If Comcast didn't exist, some other company would provide cable service to its customers, and NBC would have another owner. If BP didn't exist some other oil company would be searching for petroleum in the Gulf of Mexico and northern Alaska. If EA had gone the way of Epyx, Synapse, SSI, or 99% of other video game companies founded in the early 1980s, its video games would have appeared under another publisher's banner.
If Tesla[1] didn't exist, would the global e-car industry be anywhere close to what it is today? If SpaceX didn't exist, the odds are very, very high that the rocket industry would still be 100% expendables into the foreseeable future.
You get a lot of internet points and clicks for jumping on the hate bandwagon and cynically tearing people down.
Maybe if they weren't so focused on a manufactured villain, and people and the media had put even a tiny fraction of this scrutiny on SBF, an actual fraud might have been mitigated. But no, let's go after the guy putting rockets in space and producing millions of electric cars in the real world. He's the real bad guy!
Just surprised that HN has been flooded with the same low tier takes on Musk and tech culture in general. This audience usually understands nuance better
It is my understanding of nuance that leads to my dismissal of someone who’s success is entirely the result of US political culture where we can’t directly fund NASA so instead find a private parasite to funnel the money through so that the republicans don’t kill the program.
