4 ms·

Close. The US paid upwards of $2 million to SpaceX to provide the devices (~$1,500 / unit). The idea of them being a donation was typical marketing from Musk.

starik36 4y ago
Not exactly. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1577077410863775744?s=20&t=jCcNs8g6wyLb6OAX9U-YhA https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1577077410863775744?s=20... "SpaceX’s out of pocket cost to enable & support Starlink in Ukraine is ~$80M so far. Our support for Russia is $0. Obviously, we are pro Ukraine."
- yupper32 4y ago
  While that $80m number may be true, his tweet is not a reliable source.
  - starik36 4y ago
    I see. You took it upon yourself to decide who is a liar and who isn't.
    - michaelmrose 4y ago
      Basically anyone who doesn't have a motivation to twist the truth? Like the US government who can actually provide hard proof that they paid for the hardware? Why would we believe Elon in this case?
      - starik36 4y ago
        But there isn't proof that he is lying - you deciding whether he lied or not is your judgement call. If you may recall, the initial shipment of Starlinks were sent in response to request by Mykhailo Fedorov - Ukraine's Minister of Digital Transformation. Before US govt got involved. So I would tend to take Musk at his word. https://www.euronews.com/next/2022/02/27/elon-musk-deploys-spacex-s-starlink-internet-satellites-over-ukraine-after-request-from-vi https://www.euronews.com/next/2022/02/27/elon-musk-deploys-s...
        yupper32 4y ago
        No one is saying that he is definitively lying about the $80m. Why do you keep saying that? All I'm saying is that his tweet is not a reliable source for that number. We'd need another, more reliable source to confirm.
        starik36 4y ago
        Fair enough!
    - ceejayoz 4y ago
      > Who would know better than him? Knowing and being honest are not the same. edit: Parent poster rewrote their comment.
    - yupper32 4y ago
      I specifically said it may be true. He has a public and indisputable history of exaggerating and lying about a whole bunch of stuff, though, so he is not a reliable source for much.
      - starik36 4y ago
        Exaggerating about timelines of products being ready. You are accusing him of lying.
        yupper32 4y ago
        I'm accusing him of lying in the past, yes. He certainly exaggerates way more than he lies, but to say he hasn't lied publicly means you have your blinders on. https://elonmusk.today/ https://elonmusk.today/ has a looootttt of exaggerations that ended up being completely incorrect. It also has plenty of outright lies. Just from scrolling a bit you can find plenty of indisputable lies: Lie: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1374619379929772034 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1374619379929772034 Lie: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1256239554148724737 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1256239554148724737 Lie: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1078010341651492865 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1078010341651492865 Just to link to a few. Scrolling through the list, though, you can't help but know that Elon knows at least some of his exaggerations are bullshit, which would turn them into a lie. For example: https://twitter.com/brenttoderian/status/1557224539267817472 https://twitter.com/brenttoderian/status/1557224539267817472 turns what seemed to be an exaggeration of a product being ready into a straight up lie. Does knowingly miscategorizing facts count as a lie? Because I'm not convinced Elon is stupid enough to know that Twitter was not lying about bot numbers. If $80m turns out to be $10m, is that a lie or an exaggeration?
        hllooo 4y ago
        are these actually lies? i know tesla stopped accepting bitcoin but it doesn't seem surprising to operate nodes when they did accept it. companies change policies all the time so i wouldn't call this a lie unless they never did it all. is that public information? "almost all" possessions is pretty vague. perhaps this is false but it's not obvious at face value and wouldn't be malicious. it seems mostly a question of semantics (does renting = owning? do we mean houses and cars or clothes and silverware?). if someone tweets "i'm selling all my shit" are they lying? break pads never needing to be replaced is obviously not 100% true since some percentage of every part will inevitably break, but if pads without defects outlive the rest of the car, i don't see how you could disagree with this statement. teslas are barely old enough to evaluate this statement and doubly so for cars produced in 2018. i don't follow this stuff nearly closely enough to know if these are lies and it's not clear to me the information needed to evaluate those tweets is publicly available or even exists. i don't dispute he's made misleading statements and exaggerated but i'm not convinced it's obvious he's lying or that not seeing it means you have blinders on.
- nocoiner 4y ago
  Donating terminals at a claimed value of 5x retail is suspiciously close to the amount that would neutralize out of pocket costs after taxing into account the corresponding tax deduction, and enabling data services on said terminals is very, very close to a zero-marginal-cost transaction.
boeingUH60 4y ago
> The report found that the US Agency for International Development, or USAID, paid $1,500 apiece for 1,333 terminals, adding up to around $2 million. > According to space reporter Joey Roulette, SpaceX donated 3,667 terminals to Ukraine, or around $10 million worth, after also factoring in the three months of data it provided with the terminals. https://www.theverge.com/2022/4/8/23016670/starlink-spacex-us-government-terminals-funding-usaid https://www.theverge.com/2022/4/8/23016670/starlink-spacex-u... It seems both the US government and SpaceX donated terminals.
- nocoiner 4y ago
  Using the government’s numbers, that’s $1500 per terminal. Using the space reporter’s numbers for the SpaceX “donation,” that’s about $2700 per terminal. I thought the retail price of a starlink terminal was in the $500-600 range?
  - hunterb123 4y ago
    The probably used the high performance dishes that are $2500 currently. https://www.starlink.com/specifications?spec=2 https://www.starlink.com/specifications?spec=2
    - cma 4y ago
      Those weren't released at that point so it would have been weird not to tout them if it was the first deployment.

starik36 4y ago

Not exactly. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1577077410863775744?s=20&t=jCcNs8g6wyLb6OAX9U-YhA https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1577077410863775744?s=20... "SpaceX’s out of pocket cost to enable & support Starlink in Ukraine is ~$80M so far. Our support for Russia is $0. Obviously, we are pro Ukraine."

yupper32 4y ago
While that $80m number may be true, his tweet is not a reliable source.
- starik36 4y ago
  I see. You took it upon yourself to decide who is a liar and who isn't.
  - michaelmrose 4y ago
    Basically anyone who doesn't have a motivation to twist the truth? Like the US government who can actually provide hard proof that they paid for the hardware? Why would we believe Elon in this case?
    - starik36 4y ago
      But there isn't proof that he is lying - you deciding whether he lied or not is your judgement call. If you may recall, the initial shipment of Starlinks were sent in response to request by Mykhailo Fedorov - Ukraine's Minister of Digital Transformation. Before US govt got involved. So I would tend to take Musk at his word. https://www.euronews.com/next/2022/02/27/elon-musk-deploys-spacex-s-starlink-internet-satellites-over-ukraine-after-request-from-vi https://www.euronews.com/next/2022/02/27/elon-musk-deploys-s...
      - yupper32 4y ago
        No one is saying that he is definitively lying about the $80m. Why do you keep saying that? All I'm saying is that his tweet is not a reliable source for that number. We'd need another, more reliable source to confirm.
        starik36 4y ago
        Fair enough!
  - ceejayoz 4y ago
    > Who would know better than him? Knowing and being honest are not the same. edit: Parent poster rewrote their comment.
  - yupper32 4y ago
    I specifically said it may be true. He has a public and indisputable history of exaggerating and lying about a whole bunch of stuff, though, so he is not a reliable source for much.
    - starik36 4y ago
      Exaggerating about timelines of products being ready. You are accusing him of lying.
      - yupper32 4y ago
        I'm accusing him of lying in the past, yes. He certainly exaggerates way more than he lies, but to say he hasn't lied publicly means you have your blinders on. https://elonmusk.today/ https://elonmusk.today/ has a looootttt of exaggerations that ended up being completely incorrect. It also has plenty of outright lies. Just from scrolling a bit you can find plenty of indisputable lies: Lie: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1374619379929772034 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1374619379929772034 Lie: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1256239554148724737 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1256239554148724737 Lie: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1078010341651492865 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1078010341651492865 Just to link to a few. Scrolling through the list, though, you can't help but know that Elon knows at least some of his exaggerations are bullshit, which would turn them into a lie. For example: https://twitter.com/brenttoderian/status/1557224539267817472 https://twitter.com/brenttoderian/status/1557224539267817472 turns what seemed to be an exaggeration of a product being ready into a straight up lie. Does knowingly miscategorizing facts count as a lie? Because I'm not convinced Elon is stupid enough to know that Twitter was not lying about bot numbers. If $80m turns out to be $10m, is that a lie or an exaggeration?
        hllooo 4y ago
        are these actually lies? i know tesla stopped accepting bitcoin but it doesn't seem surprising to operate nodes when they did accept it. companies change policies all the time so i wouldn't call this a lie unless they never did it all. is that public information? "almost all" possessions is pretty vague. perhaps this is false but it's not obvious at face value and wouldn't be malicious. it seems mostly a question of semantics (does renting = owning? do we mean houses and cars or clothes and silverware?). if someone tweets "i'm selling all my shit" are they lying? break pads never needing to be replaced is obviously not 100% true since some percentage of every part will inevitably break, but if pads without defects outlive the rest of the car, i don't see how you could disagree with this statement. teslas are barely old enough to evaluate this statement and doubly so for cars produced in 2018. i don't follow this stuff nearly closely enough to know if these are lies and it's not clear to me the information needed to evaluate those tweets is publicly available or even exists. i don't dispute he's made misleading statements and exaggerated but i'm not convinced it's obvious he's lying or that not seeing it means you have blinders on.
nocoiner 4y ago
Donating terminals at a claimed value of 5x retail is suspiciously close to the amount that would neutralize out of pocket costs after taxing into account the corresponding tax deduction, and enabling data services on said terminals is very, very close to a zero-marginal-cost transaction.

boeingUH60 4y ago

> The report found that the US Agency for International Development, or USAID, paid $1,500 apiece for 1,333 terminals, adding up to around $2 million. > According to space reporter Joey Roulette, SpaceX donated 3,667 terminals to Ukraine, or around $10 million worth, after also factoring in the three months of data it provided with the terminals. https://www.theverge.com/2022/4/8/23016670/starlink-spacex-us-government-terminals-funding-usaid https://www.theverge.com/2022/4/8/23016670/starlink-spacex-u... It seems both the US government and SpaceX donated terminals.

nocoiner 4y ago
Using the government’s numbers, that’s $1500 per terminal. Using the space reporter’s numbers for the SpaceX “donation,” that’s about $2700 per terminal. I thought the retail price of a starlink terminal was in the $500-600 range?
- hunterb123 4y ago
  The probably used the high performance dishes that are $2500 currently. https://www.starlink.com/specifications?spec=2 https://www.starlink.com/specifications?spec=2
  - cma 4y ago
    Those weren't released at that point so it would have been weird not to tout them if it was the first deployment.