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I’m no huge fan of the bond villains in general, but this thread isn’t about Musk or whoever being a dick. And even if it were, Musk builds the best rockets ev

I’m no huge fan of the bond villains in general, but this thread isn’t about Musk or whoever being a dick. And even if it were, Musk builds the best rockets ever and stuff like that and to a first approximation knows how they work. Mark at a minimum is the Corp Dev CEO of a generation and I’d argue more. I’d argue he is the first person to create an accurate-ish mental model mapping IRL human mechanism design into a high-fidelity digital analogy. Bezos was at DE Shaw and called the Internet as a vehicle for commerce on the early side, to put it mildly. Ellison saw that what we now call RDBMS was going to Be Big and substantially implemented the early versions personally. Now this isn’t a license for any of the icky shit any of these folks have done since, but all of them put some of the points their character class rolled into “actually build something”. Altman put all his points into manipulate if not blackmail people around me until the machine coughs up the next stair on the ladder. I’m generally in favor of “less bond villains”, but that’s not the topic of the thread and neatly bypasses another key point which is that all the other bond villains you mentioned (and I’ve met a few of them) have some redeeming quality as opposed to, Jesus, could a fucking Kennedy get away with a farce like this? Stop changing the subject. I know all those essays by heart. I was synthesizing them with inside YC baseball the day they were published.

thaumaturgy 2y ago
[flagged]
- benreesman 2y ago
  I don’t think that studying the history of the technology business makes one a tabloid journalist. I apologize if my remark came off smartass, I can see how it could. If you feel I could be more constructive I’m legitimately (no sarcasm whatsoever) open to suggestions: it’s a tricky topic and I strike the wrong note more often than the right one. Certainly I intended no personal offense to someone I haven’t met.
bergen 2y ago
No Musk builds nothing. There is a huge team he leads, consisting of engineers and scientists and they develop technology that Musk then sells. He's a glorified cars salesman. Maybe he was essential to get the rockets built, but neither did he build them, nor contribute essential technical details, so that it would be uniquely him who could do it given same financial backing.
- azinman2 2y ago
  Meanwhile the competitors are failing. He’s doing something right that’s beyond just car salesman.
  - Log_out_ 2y ago
    In the realm of invisible monopolies and quasi-state owned the privately owned individual is only half blind.
    - azinman2 2y ago
      What does that even mean? Your structural setting changed your success potential? China would disagree. Besides… Blue origin? Boeing? These are not state owned or “invisible” yet are failing.
      - Log_out_ 2y ago
        A pension fund is a conservative entity interested in stability above all things, with longterm planning, rulebooks, almost like a small state. The line between public and private is very blurry by now and that blurryness goes both ways. Get public funding long enough and you loose your agency to become a bureau of everything nihilitary gone.
- thepasswordis 2y ago
  This image should just get autoreplied any time somebody tries to (incorrectly) claim that Elon Musk is just a salesman: https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXMasterrace/comments/ub1yav/but_the_emerald_mines/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXMasterrace/comments/ub1yav/bu...
smackay 2y ago
It's Gwynne Shotwell, COO of SpaceX, who makes the rockets fly.
- raverbashing 2y ago
  I hadn't noticed that particular nominative determinism before, interesting
- mike_hearn 2y ago
  And yet Shotwell didn't create SpaceX, define its mission, establish its products, create Starlink or recruit the core team. Musk did all of that and tons more as well. It's fascinating how nobody was making this claim of a non-technical Musk up until the moment he stopped being loyal to one particular wing of US politics. Now we see a concerted effort to diminish his achievements. Do you people really think this will work? There is endless testimony from people - independent of Musk and in the space industry - saying that the dude is an honest to god rocket scientist who single-handedly made SpaceX happen through sheer force of will, engineering ability and personal investment. He routinely displays a fluent understanding of orbital mechanics well beyond what any normal CEO would be expected to display. Anyone can read his bio or the testimony of people who work in the space industry and understand that Musk was (and still is) intimately involved in every aspect of SpaceX, down to detailed engineering decisions. Shotwell meanwhile is regularly described as managing the business development side. She negotiates with customers and oversees day to day operations. This is critical work that she clearly does very well, and she has an engineering background. But I can't find examples of people claiming that she drives product development or overall strategy for SpaceX.
  - tarsinge 2y ago
    He is diminishing his achievements all by myself on Twitter. Like before there was doubts he was technical. Now it's clear he is not and was acting (at least regarding software). If Steve Jobs was claiming he also did the iPhone engineering don't you think people would challenge that? He lies, he gets caught up, that's it. Look at his recent exchange with LeCun, is it really politics or has he simply too much ego and lost touch and people are calling it?
chipdart 2y ago
> And even if it were, Musk builds the best rockets ever and stuff like that and to a first approximation knows how they work. Being fed the tour guide's summary and high-level overview of an event is not the same thing as knowing how they work. Elon Musk's virtues start and stop at the way projects were funded. He comes in, buys existing companies, pays people to continue doing the work, and that's it. It's well established that his takes are merely performative and with a substance of a pre-pubrescent edgy rant. If there was any value in Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter, and the hot mess that his tenure has been, is to put the spotlight on how incidental the success of companies like SpaceX is regarding Elon Musk's influence. You're talking about the guy behind stunts like the "pedo guy" incident and yanking live servers out of their sockets as a cost-cutting measure.
- tim333 2y ago
  >He comes in, buys existing companies, pays people to continue doing the work, and that's it. Apart from Zip2 which he started from scratch and wrote the early code for, SpaceX which he stated from scratch, Neuralink likewise, OpenAI which he co founded and was the biggest early funder for and probably some others.
wuschel 2y ago
> mental model mapping IRL human mechanism design into a high-fidelity digital analogy Could you please elaborate what you mean by that?
- benreesman 2y ago
  Mechanism design is broadly the study (with a practical as opposed to theoretical emphasis) of the way that incentives shape human behavior. For better or worse Mark was/is able to see some deep minimal structure that allows what used to be a web page and is now a mobile app to elicit responses that bear an uncanny resemblance to the way human beings behave and interact in a setting unmediated by either a priest or a protocol. On the properties he runs people act a hell of a lot like they do in a bar or any other place where sapiens mix and match. I’m not sure that turbocharging spinal-reflex humanity via computer networks is going all that well, which is one of the main reasons I parted ways with the endeavor once the true scope for mechanical advantage became clear, but he clearly sees things about what motivates people that Freud was throwing darts at. I might have been one of the few true assassins he sent after people like Vic Gunderotta or Evan Spiegel and certainly he knows how to delegate the mechanics of leaving would-be adversaries on the scrap heap of history, but he knew who to send the hitters after and when.
davidguetta 2y ago
Isnt altman the architect of chatgpt as a product. He seems on par on that genius at the others on tech

thaumaturgy 2y ago

[flagged]

benreesman 2y ago
I don’t think that studying the history of the technology business makes one a tabloid journalist. I apologize if my remark came off smartass, I can see how it could. If you feel I could be more constructive I’m legitimately (no sarcasm whatsoever) open to suggestions: it’s a tricky topic and I strike the wrong note more often than the right one. Certainly I intended no personal offense to someone I haven’t met.

bergen 2y ago

No Musk builds nothing. There is a huge team he leads, consisting of engineers and scientists and they develop technology that Musk then sells. He's a glorified cars salesman. Maybe he was essential to get the rockets built, but neither did he build them, nor contribute essential technical details, so that it would be uniquely him who could do it given same financial backing.

azinman2 2y ago
Meanwhile the competitors are failing. He’s doing something right that’s beyond just car salesman.
- Log_out_ 2y ago
  In the realm of invisible monopolies and quasi-state owned the privately owned individual is only half blind.
  - azinman2 2y ago
    What does that even mean? Your structural setting changed your success potential? China would disagree. Besides… Blue origin? Boeing? These are not state owned or “invisible” yet are failing.
    - Log_out_ 2y ago
      A pension fund is a conservative entity interested in stability above all things, with longterm planning, rulebooks, almost like a small state. The line between public and private is very blurry by now and that blurryness goes both ways. Get public funding long enough and you loose your agency to become a bureau of everything nihilitary gone.
thepasswordis 2y ago
This image should just get autoreplied any time somebody tries to (incorrectly) claim that Elon Musk is just a salesman: https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXMasterrace/comments/ub1yav/but_the_emerald_mines/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXMasterrace/comments/ub1yav/bu...

smackay 2y ago

It's Gwynne Shotwell, COO of SpaceX, who makes the rockets fly.

raverbashing 2y ago
I hadn't noticed that particular nominative determinism before, interesting
mike_hearn 2y ago
And yet Shotwell didn't create SpaceX, define its mission, establish its products, create Starlink or recruit the core team. Musk did all of that and tons more as well. It's fascinating how nobody was making this claim of a non-technical Musk up until the moment he stopped being loyal to one particular wing of US politics. Now we see a concerted effort to diminish his achievements. Do you people really think this will work? There is endless testimony from people - independent of Musk and in the space industry - saying that the dude is an honest to god rocket scientist who single-handedly made SpaceX happen through sheer force of will, engineering ability and personal investment. He routinely displays a fluent understanding of orbital mechanics well beyond what any normal CEO would be expected to display. Anyone can read his bio or the testimony of people who work in the space industry and understand that Musk was (and still is) intimately involved in every aspect of SpaceX, down to detailed engineering decisions. Shotwell meanwhile is regularly described as managing the business development side. She negotiates with customers and oversees day to day operations. This is critical work that she clearly does very well, and she has an engineering background. But I can't find examples of people claiming that she drives product development or overall strategy for SpaceX.
- tarsinge 2y ago
  He is diminishing his achievements all by myself on Twitter. Like before there was doubts he was technical. Now it's clear he is not and was acting (at least regarding software). If Steve Jobs was claiming he also did the iPhone engineering don't you think people would challenge that? He lies, he gets caught up, that's it. Look at his recent exchange with LeCun, is it really politics or has he simply too much ego and lost touch and people are calling it?

chipdart 2y ago

> And even if it were, Musk builds the best rockets ever and stuff like that and to a first approximation knows how they work. Being fed the tour guide's summary and high-level overview of an event is not the same thing as knowing how they work. Elon Musk's virtues start and stop at the way projects were funded. He comes in, buys existing companies, pays people to continue doing the work, and that's it. It's well established that his takes are merely performative and with a substance of a pre-pubrescent edgy rant. If there was any value in Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter, and the hot mess that his tenure has been, is to put the spotlight on how incidental the success of companies like SpaceX is regarding Elon Musk's influence. You're talking about the guy behind stunts like the "pedo guy" incident and yanking live servers out of their sockets as a cost-cutting measure.

tim333 2y ago
>He comes in, buys existing companies, pays people to continue doing the work, and that's it. Apart from Zip2 which he started from scratch and wrote the early code for, SpaceX which he stated from scratch, Neuralink likewise, OpenAI which he co founded and was the biggest early funder for and probably some others.

wuschel 2y ago

> mental model mapping IRL human mechanism design into a high-fidelity digital analogy Could you please elaborate what you mean by that?

benreesman 2y ago
Mechanism design is broadly the study (with a practical as opposed to theoretical emphasis) of the way that incentives shape human behavior. For better or worse Mark was/is able to see some deep minimal structure that allows what used to be a web page and is now a mobile app to elicit responses that bear an uncanny resemblance to the way human beings behave and interact in a setting unmediated by either a priest or a protocol. On the properties he runs people act a hell of a lot like they do in a bar or any other place where sapiens mix and match. I’m not sure that turbocharging spinal-reflex humanity via computer networks is going all that well, which is one of the main reasons I parted ways with the endeavor once the true scope for mechanical advantage became clear, but he clearly sees things about what motivates people that Freud was throwing darts at. I might have been one of the few true assassins he sent after people like Vic Gunderotta or Evan Spiegel and certainly he knows how to delegate the mechanics of leaving would-be adversaries on the scrap heap of history, but he knew who to send the hitters after and when.

davidguetta 2y ago

Isnt altman the architect of chatgpt as a product. He seems on par on that genius at the others on tech