I don't know how someone could look at Dorsey/Musk/Bezos actions and still be interested in what they have to say. There's probably a lot to be learned from someone who worships money, assuming that your goal is to emulate them.
However their lifestyle and ideology is inherently dangerous to workers and life on earth as we know it. So yeah I don't really care what they have to say beyond knowing how the enemy views the average citizen (hint: it's not very positively).
I think what they have to say is uninteresting for a very different reason. The owe very little of what they own to what they actually think and do. They just managed to keep on top of a huge commercial organism which development and almost cancerous growth has been dictated more by the environment it grew in and sheer chance than any single human opinions and choices. By every possible individual measurement they are no further from average than a standard deviation. There are many more unique and interesting people.
That feat of staying on top of self-inflating balloon is their only claim to fame. So they might have interesting things to say about how to backstab and exploit and avoid getting dethroned but that's all. Unfortunately that's what not they happily share.
That too. These people aren't exceptional in interesting ways, they are however exceptionally optimized for one kind of success (getting that dolla dolla bill) in a zero interest rate tech environment. Turns out that being a good con man is the optimal way to do that, but then why would I want to listen to a con man?
Sorry. When I look at Musk I see self landing rockets, electric cars , star link etc. Obviously he seems to be quite close to truth since without getting close to reality you can't do any of these since Physics is brutal and does not reward any false assumptions.
So that gives me a sense that Musk is much closer to truth than most people out there. What am I missing?
Are you saying without Musk involvement these companies would have been even better performing? Like how did you do that calculation? Seems almost impossible to me how one can simulate that.
This is demented levels of cope. Musk is the most successful is basically everything he does across extremely different industries. SpaceX is a decade ahead of the next closest competitor. Tesla and self driving is wildly ahead of any other car manufacturer.
I think this makes a great argument for Sharia Law as created during the Islamic Golden Age. I don't think there's any period of time with more scientific advancement. Astronomy, architecture, calculus, statistics, physics, chemistry, biology, medicine... You name it, they improved it. Does this means their legal system must be "closer to truth" too?
Not many. I grew up in a developing country so making money and getting out of low middle class has always been on my mind since childhood. So I don't have much interest in inventors that remains poor. Though I love Feynman if you count him as an inventor. Funny enough PayPal helped me make my first income by doing a remote job when I was in school.
I'm not a big conference goer so my sample rate is not super high, but I've seen zero keynote speakers with something I cared to listen to. Regardless of their ideology ... I'm just not getting much out of those kinds of speakers.
I'll tell a little story:
I worked at a company with like 1k employees. Good company as far as I knew, as much as such a company can be.
I work the night shift (tech support) and I'm young so I go to the company wide meeting in person because I'm curious and honestly don't have much to do. CEO talks, nothing of interest is said. I go back to my desk and get my things and I'm really tired and I'm in the elevator heading home.
CEO steps in. Smiles and introduces himself and says "What did you think?" I'm really tired, so I say something like "It was ok I guess, it's just not my kinda event. Stuff I really want to know I don't think can be said at an event like that..."
Other folks in the elevator (including my boss's boss who I didn't notice) look kinda horrified.
CEO looks at me and pauses for a minute: "Yeah I get it..."
And that was the truth of it ... there's nothing for those folks to say that they can say that I would want to know. I want the nitty gritty, not some pie in the sky stuff.
Yeah the keynote format is really weird. It's more about getting people inspired and hiping your company than talking about anything.
I understand it when it's someone important in the community, but I think the "invited keynote" is a monstrosity that makes no sense and was invented at the behest of sponsors.
What other person started a rocket company from scratch and got them landing? Of course I want to hear everything he says. Yes, he's crazy - seems to be a requirement if you want to do such stuff. Doesn't mean I will ignore it. I can think for myself, it's not like I take everything at face value.
All that to say, perhaps other people don't prioritize values like you do. The technical excellence that companies repeatedly achieved under Musk is incredible.
> What other person started a rocket company from scratch and got them landing?
I'd rather listen to Lars Blackmore (the engineer who is largely responsible for SpaceX powered descent). Or Gwynne Shotwell who actually oversees the business day-to-day. I'm really not interested in what the money guy has to say, especially since he is primarily interested in cultivating his public image-- how can you trust anything he says? The dude pays people to play a videogame for him 24/7 so he can pretend he is the best player in the world. That's not a metaphor -- he actually does that.
Sure, I'm not saying Musk is the only person who has interesting things to say about it. You're absolutely correct about these other people and I listen to them too.
But you're not giving Musk enough credit. All engineers and other professionals told him that landing rockets is bullshit, and what is interesting here is that he went and made it happen anyways.
I'm not talking just about the engineering, everything is interesting here - the project management, the hiring, the investments, the business side... Musk has a lot of input and influence in all of these, he was the one who decided and paid for it.
> All engineers and other professionals told him that landing rockets is bullshit
You literally responded to a guy citing Lars Blackmore, who is the engineer that designed their landing algorithm--which was developed at NASA's JPL lab (before SpaceX existed).
Musk bet on landing rockets _because_ engineers told him that it was possible.
The Air Force was studying RTLS as part of the ARES (Affordable REsponsive Spacelift) program in 2005 (Which was the result of 1992/1994-era discussions on "spacecast 2020"):
And I don't see any rocket actually coming back with an orbital payload? Where's the demonstrator? Like that quiet supersonic thing Lockheed is demonstrating.
Even Lars didn't deliver at the first attempt. So it's not like it was something available off the shelf. Like some cryptography library you include in your code.
> All engineers and other professionals told him that landing rockets is bullshit
Every company has some kind of mythology where someone says "you'll never make it in this town!". The reality is that uncrewed propulsive landing was technologically feasible since the soviets landed a rover on the moon. NASA propulsively landed a rover on Mars back in 2011.
Like I said, listening to billionaires is probably interesting if your goal is "acquire boatloads of money". But we already know how to do that.
1. Appear confident
2. Lie
3. Have no morals or ethics
4. Prioritize the pursuit of power above all else
Sorry but no, this is absolutely not what happened. I am watching it closely ever since SpaceX was founded in 2002. There is an incredible gap between the tech demo you're speaking about, and actually landing a heavy orbital rocket, and then doing it 100 times in a row without a hiccup.
Mars is completely off topic, as they didn't land the booster there. We had Space Shuttle before and it didn't say much about landing rocket boosters.
> There is an incredible gap between the tech demo you're speaking about,
Didn't Apollo 11 land on the moon using a rocket, then take off from the moon again, back in the 1960s?
Not exactly a tech demo. And the Apollo missions had the additional challenges of being crewed, and targeting an atmosphere and gravity they couldn't reproduce on earth for test purposes.
The SpaceX stuff is neat though, compared to the defence industry clowns they're competing with.
Apollo 11 had a three stage rocket and every stage was discarded. SpaceX is obviously not the first company to land something - but landing a rocket booster that just performed an orbital lift is the interesting and extremely hard thing to do. The payload can be entirely designed to land - but the booster has many other constraints (payload weight and its desired velocity and trajectory being some of them).
To do what Apollo 11 did without discarding the boosters you also need orbital refueling and probably rapid turnaround (or a huge inventory of boosters), which SpaceX plans to develop next. Awesome stuff.
You know, this bit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Lunar_Module that descended to the moon, landed, some guys walked out and grabbed some moon rocks, then they took off again and made it back to earth.
That's a rocket-propelled space vehicle gently landing tail first, and ready for immediately reuse.
Given that it clearly had been done, I doubt anyone who knew what they were talking about was telling Musk it couldn't be done.
I don't know how to put this if you don't see the difference yourself by now, but that's not an orbital rocket that could lift anything from Earth nor land back there. One huge problem is hypersonic aerodynamics, something you absolutely don't care about on the Moon. The payload weight can be much greater due to tiny gravity. Google "tyranny of the rocket equation".
Okay, that is one down. You've got to get through literally all the rest of the engineers and professionals. At some point, you'll hit the engineers at NASA that were working on this problem before SpaceX existed.
Well I heard it myself from practically anybody up until 2015. I even attended quite a lot of conference talks on this topic... I'm sure it's not hard to find it online, famously a NASA director (I think?) did so.
You're saying every engineer and every person with any other type of profession you've ever spoken with, said that it was impossible to land a rocket? I feel like plenty of professionals don't even have an opinion on the matter.
Even if that's true, there's still every engineer and every other professional in the world you haven't spoken with. To take an example, I'm an engineer, I didn't say it. That disproves the claim.
If we wanted to be more accurate, we could say that less than 0.00001% of all engineers and professionals told elmu that it was impossible to land a rocket.
That seems less impressive than saying 100%, doesn't it? But hey, this is hacker news, not a math exam, and 100% is pretty much < 0.00001%, lol.
> Sorry but no, this is absolutely not what happened
What didn't happen? I didn't provide you a narrative, I gave 2 examples of uncrewed propulsive landing which literally happened.
> There is an incredible gap between the tech demo you're speaking about, and actually landing a heavy orbital rocket, and then doing it 100 times in a row without a hiccup.
I agree. Now please point to me which part of the self-landing booster Elon built.
I told you what didn't happen - the situation wasn't as clear as you say. Everybody in the space industry was absolutely sure he is totally crazy and it's impossible to do with an entire first/second stage rocket booster.
He built the company that built the booster, which to me is at least as interesting as building the booster itself.
It's not just about money - Bezos has much more money available than SpaceX had in 2002-2015, and yet his rockets still don't land.
Actually, Blue Origin beat SpaceX to land a booster. The difference is that BO landed New Shepard, which can barely bump a manned capsule over the Karman line, whereas SpaceX is landing an orbital-class booster, which is a much more difficult proposition.
I do agree though that SpaceX has used their money much more efficiently and moved a lot faster in general than BO.
He doesn’t do that. People who don’t like him claim that he does without any basis to it, and you’re perpetuating this hyperbole by claiming it as fact when the very thing you linked doesn’t even go that far.
Musk sucks, attack him for valid reasons like racism instead of some made up bullshit about cheating at video games.
He literally does do that. Top-level players of the game have called him out for it. They have tracked his time with an API. It is actually mathematically impossible to be at his level in POE-- you would have to be a top-tier player and play nonstop for 20+ hrs a day.
People who like Musk aren't going to care that he is racist, they will argue about what actually constitutes as racism (erm pushes up glasses --actually have u read the bell curve???).
Having definitive proof of him paying others to play videogames for him is an example of how he just lies about everything. If he lies about videogames what else does he lie about?
Where does he lie about a video game? Maybe he has someone boost his level. Did he say it's not true? Just doing that can have many reasons - maybe he likes a shiny number there, wants a bigger challenge, more fun because of higher level and more items or whatever.
Just playing on an account that I didn't level up myself is not lying. I know that some competitive amateur players think it's the end of the world but no, nobody cares.
He stated on Joe Rogan he was one of the best Diablo players in the world (top 20 or thereabouts). The only way to do that is to grind the game with long hours, because it gets exponentially more difficult to level up. I don't remember exactly how many hours of playtime he'd need to achieve the level he was at, but it was excessive. Something like 14+ hours a day.
Then he recently live streamed his Path of Exile 2 account. It was one of the highest leveled accounts in the world. Similar to Diablo, that's not possible without grinding the game for many hours. However, it was clear from the stream that Musk barely understood how to play the game. He was having trouble just finding things in the UI.
The point is: he paid someone (or multiple people) for a leveled up account. Then he publicly claimed to be one of the top players in the world.
It's both shocking and revealing that he's willing to put forth such a blatant lie, for something that matters so little (a video game).
Thank you, if he really said that he is one of the best players, that would be a lie. I don't think just streaming a leveled up account is a lie, though.
Why do you talk about hours per day? Does it matter if you play less hours per day, but more days?
> Why do you talk about hours per day? Does it matter if you play less hours per day, but more days?
Because the only way to level up your character is to grind through a dungeon. You'll get experience for doing so. Every time you level up your character, it takes exponentially more experience to hit the next level.
I don't remember the exact number of hours per day that are required to hit the levels his characters are at, but it's in excess of 14+ hours/day.
Combine that with the evidence from his live streaming that he doesn't actually know how to play these games, and it's clear that he can't have achieved the character levels he has on his own.
To be clear, I don't think anyone really cares that he's paying for a leveled up account. What people care about is that he's taking credit for achieving the high level on his own, when that's obviously not true.
Q: Why would a person with $300 billion feel the need to lie about being good at a video game?
A: Likely because deception has become habitual/reflexive for them.
The point is Elon lies about the most trivial things where it's easy to show he's lying. Elon is a habitual liar. His continual lying is starting to hurt business.
When will Tesla FSD be fully functional? Why would you believe anything Elon has to say on the matter since he's a habitual liar?
Elon faked the Optimus robot demo. Which has called into question the entirety of the Robotaxi reveal.
Tesla's new DumpsterTruck doesn't have many of the capabilities he promised years ago.
Maybe you don't care that people habitually lie to you, even about the most trivial of things, but I care. It tells me a lot about a person's honor and integrity, or in Elon's case, his utter and complete lack of those virtues.
I don't care about a video game but this exposé has a lot more damning examples of Musk lying through his teeth to get where he is, totally recommend the read (and the related links in the article): https://sethabramson.substack.com/p/the-truth-about-musk-fro...
Right, but you replied to the parent, not yourself, and the parent didn't call him "crazy", they simply pointed out that he is hostile to workers (he is).
It's sad that people can see a good thing and think it cancels out all bad things
McDonnell Douglas seems to have gotten it done, from a quick skim of [1]. It appears they ran out of funding and the program was cancelled. According to the same article,
> Elon Musk stated that the SpaceX Falcon 9 development was "... continuing the great work of the DC-X project."
It's so sad that the current culture wants to judge peoples life based on the worst they've ever done. Yea, Musk is a troll online, but his success as a business/tech leader is something you can only doubt by donning the proverbial tin foil hat.
I care less about his "troll" posts online (implying there is a conspiracy of jews importing people to destroy America is just a troll and not an actual Nazi conspiracy guys) than his manipulation of the US government, mistreatment of workers, and maybe the most egregious of all, being a fake nerd and pretending to like Evangelion.
Elon Musk is concerned about climate change, and created Telsa to lead the migration to electric cars to help combat climate change. That seems like a positive impact to life on earth.
So maybe in the past he was concerned about climate change, but that appears to no longer be the case, or its further down on his list, below accumulating billions in wealth and amassing political power.
Lovely word "materially" there, doing a load of work. That way you can just say that subsidizing renewables, or battery manufacturing, or efficiency refits for housing isn't "material" and now you aren't a liar!
Well sure, I'm unhappy about every politician's efforts, they all need to be doing more. But I can also be more unhappy about the guy who denies it exists entirely, staffs his cabinet for more deniers, and does his incompetent best to roll back the very tiny gains we've managed to obtain.
Musk believed in the silly Peak Oil theory, and jumped in early at Tesla because he figured that Peak Oil would create a market for electric cars. Tesla itself has embraced climate change both because there are many employees there passionate about it and because it's good marketing for them.
Elon Musk did not found Tesla, and most definitely did not did it for environmental reasons.
"Tesla was incorporated in July 2003 by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning as Tesla Motors." [1]
"If, I don’t know, 50 to 100 years from now, we’re mostly sustainable. I think that’ll probably be okay. So it’s not like the house is on fire immediately.
[...]
"The risk is not as high as a lot of people say it is with respect to global warming." [2]
Thanks for the clarification about founding. But he joined as chair of the board when the company was less than 1 year old, and helped develop their first car.
>and most definitely did not did it for environmental reasons.
From that same link, he says one of the goals of Tesla is to make environmentalism cool:
> And so you get the solar power, mind that with batteries. So because obviously the sun doesn't shine at night and then you use that to charge the electric cars and you have a long-term sustainable solution.
> And, you know, that's what Tesla is trying to move things towards. And I think we've made a lot of progress in that regard. But when you look at our cars, like we don't believe that environmentalism, that caring about the environment should mean that you have to suffer.
> So we make sure that our cars are beautiful, that they drive well, that they're fast, they're, you know, sexy. I mean, they're cool.
However their lifestyle and ideology is inherently dangerous to workers and life on earth as we know it. So yeah I don't really care what they have to say beyond knowing how the enemy views the average citizen (hint: it's not very positively).